The Fried Yam Project is a place to gather my research and writing around speculative interpretation.

A History of Fried Yam

This project has arisen from over 10 years of being fascinated by the relationship between art and language. In 2015, I read Guillaume Apollinaire’s writings on cubist painters during the final year of my degree in French and Italian. I found his short book Les Peintres cubistes highly confusing but, as a result, excitingly open to interpretation. The cubists were trying to present many viewpoints simultaneously in their paintings and, it seemed, Apollinaire was applying the same concept to his writing. To me, it made sense that as a writer he wouldn’t try to capture cubism in a linear writing style and instead give the reader a taste of what it was like to experience the artwork itself.

Over the following years, I became interested in how art was interpreted in museums and galleries. I did an MA in Curating at the Courtauld Institute of Art. My dissertation focussed on the interpretation of objects and artworks related to histories of colonialism, racism and empire. For a while, it seemed to me that the way to write accessible and inclusive texts was to remove all risk, not try anything new, anything that hadn’t been said before. It felt like I was writing to fit a mould, and I became scared of giving my own interpretations, of being ‘wrong’.

This changed when I wrote Fried Yam in the Museum in early 2021. It was the first piece of writing I’d ever shared publicly and has influenced nearly everything I’ve written since. It seemed to make an impression: it was shared with Tate’s interpretation team and quoted in the retirement speech of one of my previous professors at the Courtauld; it was chosen as a set text for the Courtauld’s MA in Curating and published in their postgraduate journal. I presented a variation – Fried Yam in the Archive – at the Architectural Association, and it was later included in their book As Hardly Found: Art and Tropical Architecture.

In 2024, I started thinking about the wider possibilities of creative approaches to art writing and presented Speculative Approaches to Art Interpretation at the Association for Art History’s annual conference and as part of Tate’s research seminar series. Since then, I have led a creative art writing workshop at the Fitzwilliam Museum and given guest lectures on speculative interpretation at Central Saint Martins and the University of Leicester. I’ve also put some of this research into practice, writing Possession, a short story responding to the work of Anna Perach.

In 2026, I hope to continue exploring the intersections between art, fiction and poetry, with more writing and collaborations with other writers and artists.