The Essay

Margaret Heffernan explores how art can help us deal with uncertainty in our lives. How does an artist know when a piece is finished? Or more precisely, when they should stop work and launch it into the world? Margaret Heffernan is a writer and entrepreneur, author of the award-winning 'Uncharted: How to Map the Future'. Here, she takes inspiration from artists who embrace uncertainty.Producer: Mary Ward-Lowery

Margaret Heffernan explores how art can help us deal with uncertainty in our lives. How do artists tolerate the fear that uncertainty creates? Modern life feels increasingly uncertain, to the point of making us uncomfortable. Most people hate uncertainty. We feel calmer knowing something bad is definitely coming (say, an electric shock) than when there's a possibility we might escape it. New technology sometimes seems to have the goal of eliminating uncertainty, but is this really desirable? Margaret argues that an element of uncertainty is a necessary part of the creative process, a catalyst which can help us find ways of meeting the challenges of the future. Artists deal with uncertainty all the time: starting work nobody asked for, rarely sure where the work will go, when it’s finished or whether it will connect with a public. This can be deeply frightening: Tracey Emin sketches before having enough courage to paint; Sebastian Barry fears the next word won’t come. To the frequent dismay of fans, art

Margaret Heffernan explores how art can help us deal with uncertainty in our lives. How do artists begin a new project? The point is to be open to the world, and to have 'an eye that is always watching'. Modern life feels increasingly uncertain, to the point of making us uncomfortable. Most people hate uncertainty. We feel calmer knowing something bad is definitely coming (say, an electric shock) than when there's a possibility we might escape it. New technology sometimes seems to have the goal of eliminating uncertainty, but is this really desirable? Margaret argues that an element of uncertainty is a necessary part of the creative process, a catalyst which can help us find ways of meeting the challenges of the future. Artists deal with uncertainty all the time: starting work nobody asked for, rarely sure where the work will go, when it’s finished or whether it will connect with a public. This can be deeply frightening: Tracey Emin sketches before having enough courage to paint; Sebastian Barry fear

Margaret Heffernan explores how art can help us deal with uncertainty in our lives. Modern life feels increasingly uncertain, to the point of making us uncomfortable. Most people hate uncertainty. We feel calmer knowing something bad is definitely coming (say, an electric shock) than when there's a possibility we might escape it. New technology sometimes seems to have the goal of eliminating uncertainty, but is this really desirable? Margaret argues that an element of uncertainty is a necessary part of the creative process, a catalyst which can help us find ways of meeting the challenges of the future. Artists deal with uncertainty all the time: starting work nobody asked for, rarely sure where the work will go, when it’s finished or whether it will connect with a public. This can be deeply frightening: Tracey Emin sketches before having enough courage to paint; Sebastian Barry fears the next word won’t come. To the frequent dismay of fans, artists change direction before they have to. They have agenc

Perhaps above all, the artistic quality we prize most is imagination. Psychologist Professor Victoria Tischler explores the enigmatic work of ceramicist Shinichi Sawada. Shinichi's sculptures look like small demons or monsters. The organic forms are covered with clay studs that resemble spikes, some forming mask-like facial figures, like totem poles.As an artist with autism, Shinichi is largely non-verbal, so he can't explain the meaning of his work, allowing the viewers' imagination to run riot. The best way to experience any art.

Writer and broadcaster Lindsay Johns completes his exploration of South African food, as he discusses the national dish, and what it says about the Rainbow Nation.South African cuisine is as varied as South Africa itself, and in this set of Essays, Lindsay has delved into its different cuisines for five personal and lyrical ruminations on what these foods evoke for him. Each Essay - covering one of South Africa's racial groups - offers distinct memories of different aspects of his many experiences in South Africa. We'll sample the different cuisines, and experience these nuanced and complex communities through Lindsay's eyes, ears, and taste buds.In today's final Essay, Lindsay strolls through the picture postcard community of Bo-Kaap in Cape Town, on his way to eat a personal favourite - tomato bredie. His lunch companion, meanwhile, orders bobotie - a meal which originated in the country's Cape Malay community but has now become the national dish. And as he reflects on the series, Lindsay wonders what this

In this essay on untrained and self-taught artists, psychologist Professor Victoria Tischler focuses on devotion and the important role of faith and belief and how it manifests artistically. Now considered one of the most important folk artists of the 20th century, Minnie Evans was born in 1892 in a cabin in North Carolina, the great-granddaughter of a slave from Trinidad. She attributed much of her inspiration to religious visions she began having as a child. “God has sent me an angel that stands by me. It stands with me and directs me what to do”. But from these humble beginnings, Evans work has gone on to grace the central pavilion at the Venice Biennale in the summer 2022.

Writer and broadcaster Lindsay Johns explores the food of South Africa.South African cuisine is as varied as South Africa itself, and in this set of Essays, Lindsay will delve into the foods of the Rainbow Nation for five personal and lyrical ruminations on what these foods evoke for him. Each Essay - covering one of South Africa's racial groups - offers distinct memories of different aspects of his many experiences in South Africa. We'll sample the different cuisines, and experience these nuanced and complex communities through Lindsay's eyes, ears, and taste buds.In today's Essay, Lindsay introduces Bunny chow, a dish made from a hollowed-out loaf of bread filled with curry, which was created in Durban, and is today the most famous dish of Durban’s Indian community – one of the largest in the world outside India itself. Born at a time when Indian restaurateurs were prevented by law from serving food to black workers - the dish was served surreptitiously so that passing police forces would see only a loaf of

Writer and broadcaster Lindsay Johns explores the food of South Africa.South African cuisine is as varied as South Africa itself, and in this set of Essays, Lindsay will delve into the foods of the Rainbow Nation for five personal and lyrical ruminations on what these foods evoke for him. Each Essay - covering one of South Africa's racial groups - offers distinct memories of different aspects of his many experiences in South Africa. We'll sample the different cuisines, and experience these nuanced and complex communities through Lindsay's eyes, ears, and taste buds.For his third Essay, Lindsay will describe the cuisine he knows, and loves, the best: Cape Coloured cuisine. We'll learn about snoek (barracuda), pickled fish, mince and cabbage stew and the Gatsby steak sandwich. It is, he says, the quintessential poor man’s fusion cuisine - and the most under-rated and overlooked food in the whole country.Producer: Giles Edwards

Writer and broadcaster Lindsay Johns explores the food of South Africa. South African cuisine is as varied as South Africa itself, and in this set of Essays, Lindsay will delve into the foods of the Rainbow Nation for five personal and lyrical ruminations on what these foods evoke for him. Each Essay - covering one of South Africa's racial groups - offers distinct memories of different aspects of his many experiences in South Africa. We'll sample the different cuisines, and experience these nuanced and complex communities through Lindsay's eyes, ears, and taste buds. For his first Essay, Lindsay invites listeners to join him as he samples the cuisine of South Africa’s Xhosa and Zulu township communities – smiley (a boiled sheep’s head in a drum), amangina (chicken, cow, pig, lamb and sheep’s feet served with hot sauce), and pap – a cornmeal porridge so popular it appears on the menu at South African branches of KFC. Lindsay says it does what it ought to do - "placate the belly and nourish the soul."Producer:

Writer and broadcaster Lindsay Johns explores the food of South Africa.South African cuisine is as varied as South Africa itself, and in this set of Essays, Lindsay will delve into the foods of the Rainbow Nation for five personal and lyrical ruminations on what these foods evoke for him. Each Essay - covering one of South Africa's racial groups - offers distinct memories of different aspects of his many experiences in South Africa. We'll sample the different cuisines, and experience these nuanced and complex communities through Lindsay's eyes, ears, and taste buds.For this second Essay, we find Lindsay walking up Table Mountain in Cape Town, and munching on biltong, what he calls "the most regal and masculine of all amuse-bouches". We'll hear, too, about the importance of the braai, and about the central place of meat in white South African cuisine. But as Lindsay chews this all over, he mulls an important question: for many years this cuisine was seen as the ‘Oppressors’ food’ – so should he still be reluct

Few artists can rival Mary Barnes for the sheer honesty of experience conveyed in paintings she created while in the grips of psychosis. Her 'IT' series of paintings are a brutal depiction of severe mental illness, and some of the best visual examples of the pathos and terror of the experience. In later life when her mental health recovered she began to exhibit her work and to give lectures on mental health, psychotherapy, and the importance of creativity in her recovery.For psychologist Professor Victoria Tischler she's drawn to Mary’s work as it is more than an illustration of mental illness but also a story of the power of honesty to find truth, hope and salvation.

Unconventionality is a quality celebrated in art, and no-one demonstrates it better than Madge Gill. Psychologist Prof Victoria Tischler explores this mesmerising artist's work.Her embroidered calicos, some 40 metres in length are full of elegant black lines filling every space of the fabric, in patterns that appear to form a winding staircase and chequerboard tiles, similar to those that would have been fashionable in the Victorian and Edwardian times in which she lived. The fact that Gill became an artist at all was unconventional enough. Born out of wedlock in the working class east end of London, she was sent to Canada aged nine as part of a child labour scheme. It was just one of the many tragedies and hardships to befall her in her life, yet her artistic output is testimony to her efforts not to be defined by them.

Psychologist Professor Victoria Tischler celebrates 'outsider art.' Art created by the marginalised, the untrained, those outside the establishment. She begins with an essay on 'the Picasso of psychotic art' Adolf Wölfli. He called himself The Holy St Adolf the Second, master of algebra, military commander in chief, and chief music director, giant theatre director, captain of the almighty giant steamship and doctor of arts and sciences. Confined to the Waldu asylum in Switzerland for more than half his life, the Surrealist artist André Breton referred to Wölfli’s art as one of the three or four most important bodies of works of the twentieth century.Wölfli's output was prodigious and it's this compulsion to create that Victoria wants to explore - was painting a release from his mental anguish or was the urge part of the torment?

As she travels the world and prepares to become a mother, the narrator of Olivia Wenzel’s novel reflects on her upbringing as a queer, Black woman in a white family, with her mother, a rebellious East German punk who was mostly absent, and her grandmother who was loyal to the socialist regime. Her father, an Angolan student, left shortly after she was born and her twin brother died when they were 17. For Queer History Month, New Generation Thinker Tom Smith looks at the ideas of queer family life explored in 1000 Serpentinen Angst, now available in an English translation by Dr Priscilla Layne as 1000 Coils of Fear.Producer: Ruth Watts

Soldiers fighting in the Crimean War lapped up this story and it also influenced the young William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones who read it at Oxford. The Heir of Redclyffe, published in 1853, reflects the mid-Victorian trend for medievalism and resurgence of High Church Anglicanism, combining gothic melodrama with sharply observed social realism, sprightly dialogue and wry humour. Although Charlotte M Yonge came to be associated mainly with domestic realism, in her long career (1823–1901) she worked across a wide range of genres, writing biographies, histories, children's books, and novels from historical epics to long-running family sagas. In Yonge's bicentenary year, New Generation Thinker Clare Walker-Gore argues that now is the time to rediscover this brilliant and neglected woman writer.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Urbanisation, migration and ‘folk language’ are explored in the 1984 novel by Latife Tekin. The story is a carnivalesque fusion of contrasts like its title – where ‘Berji’ conjures images of an innocent shepherdess and ‘Kristin’ of a sex worker. There’s blind old Güllü Baba, rumoured to cure the ills caused by a nearby factory’s chemical wastewater. There’s Fidan of Many Skills, rumoured to know all the ‘arts of the bed’. There’s the rumour of roads, jobs, and clean water coming to Flower Hill: they never materialise. In his foreword to Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills, John Berger crowns ‘rumour’ its ultimate storyteller. New Generation Thinker Sarah Jilani looks at the way the inhabitants of Flower Hill make sense of their disorienting transition from village life to shantytown in the story from one of Turkey's most influential female authors writing today.Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Poet, abolitionist, and activist for women’s rights, Frances EW Harper was one of the first African American women to be published in the United States, producing 80 poems, various articles, sketches, serialised books and short stories and a novel printed when she was aged 67. New Generation Thinker Xine Yao looks at her career, focusing on this 1892 novel Iola Leroy. It tells the story of a Black mixed race woman who survives the Civil War, experiences romances and has to navigate the post-emancipation world and it explores ideas about science, education, evolving forms of anti-Black racism, and women's social responsibilities. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Arrested by military intelligence, Philip Wylie (1902-1971) went on to become an adviser to the chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee for Atomic Energy. At least nine films have been made out of stories he published which ranged across topics including ecology, science fiction and the threat of nuclear holocaust. New Generation Thinker Sarah Dillon reads his short story The Paradise Crater. Producer: Luke Mulhall

Great empty buildings, which only a few decades ago were bustling convents, tower over most towns and villages in Ireland, but they represent a world which is disappearing along with the once all-powerful Irish Roman Catholic Church. In this series of The Essay, Olivia O'Leary, convent-educated and a lapsed Catholic, asks where all the Irish nuns have gone.Olivia's final essay is about the end of the tradition of religious orders. Ireland has fallen out of love with the Catholic Church. Hardly a month goes by without more revelations of harsh treatment of girls in institutions run by nuns and of sexual abuse of boys in institutions run by brothers and priests. Nuns have to deal with being despised in a country that used to see them as saints. ‘Before, we were on a pedestal we didn’t deserve’ one nun said to Olivia. ‘Neither do we deserve the gutter. But we took the pedestal, so now we have to take the gutter.’Presenter Olivia O'Leary Producer Claire Cunningham A Rockfinch production for BBC Radio 3