Nicola McCartney – författare

Five new short plays, including author commentaries, from female and non-binary writers of Irish heritage in response to Samuel Beckett.What does Irish heritage mean to members of the modern-day diaspora? Global playwrights Olwen Fouéré, Jennifer Barclay, FELISPEAKS, Nicola McCartney and Hannah Khalil make their mark with five unique pieces loosely inspired by seeds from the Beckett canon.Originally staged for the international Not Beckett festival 2024-25, a festival created by writers Hannah Khalil and Jennifer Barclay to expand on the idea of what Irishness looks and sounds like. Premiering in October 2024 at London’s Jermyn Street Theatre, the plays were then staged internationally with partners on the project: The Samuel Beckett Research Centre in Reading, the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, Fishamble in Dublin in collaboration with the Lir Academy, and Villanova University in Philadelphia, PA, amongst others.Each short play provides an ideal vehicle for students and readers to further explore the artistic influence of Samuel Beckett’s work through a modern-day, multicultural lens. The collection is introduced by Dr Matthew McFrederick, Co-Director of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading, who considers the plays in the anthology and their impact.duet by Olwen FouéréNever Apologize by Jennifer BarclayWAIT; by FELISPEAKSI CAN'T REMEMBER THE by Nicola McCartneyThe Lighthouse Keeper's Son by Hannah Khalil

There exists a series of contemporary artists who continually defy the traditional role of the artist/author, including Art & Language, Guerrilla Girls, Bob and Roberta Smith, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and Lucky PDF. In Death of the Artist, Nicola McCartney explores their work and uses previously unpublished interviews to provoke a vital and nuanced discussion about contemporary artistic authorship. How do emerging artists navigate intellectual property or work collectively and share the recognition? How might a pseudonym aid 'artivism'? Most strikingly, she demonstrates how an alternative identity can challenge the art market and is symptomatic of greater cultural and political rebellion. As such, this book exposes the art world's financially incentivised infrastructures, but also examines how they might be reshaped from within. In an age of cuts to arts funding and forced self-promotion, this offers an important analysis of the pressing need for the artistic community to construct new ways to reinvent itself and incite fresh responses to its work.

Animal Drag asserts that performing animality is a political act, capable of de-stabilising humanism and constructs of othering, especially species. The volume trots across and crawls through human-animal studies, posthumanism, theories of drag and thus queer theories of performance and adornment too, to argue that critical and conscious acts of animality challenge the audience to reconsider societal shapings of the nonhuman and the human-animal divide. Historically, those othered have also been considered nonhuman. In doing so, Animal Drag also squawks with many other “minority” studies that have worked with Critical Animal Studies as part of illuminating problematic binaries, but through a series of single acts that disrupt these through the one performance. Together, it weaves a wider discourse on the social and material semiotics of “doing human”, to hopefully generate a wider web of care.