Speculative Fiction Readings by Mimi Lawrence, Chloe Bonfield and Maria Christoforidi
An evening of short stories from three local artists interspersed with sound and food.
What to expect
6pm - Doors open
6.30pm - Readings/performances
7.40pm - Vegan dinner is served
8.10-9pm - Discussion/communal writing
9-9.30pm - Soft close, socialising
This event is BYOB - please bring along a drink to have yourself and/or to share! There is a SPAR shop just a few meters up the road. There will be a selection of soft drinks available at a low cost, and free tea and coffee on tap.
Tickets
All tickets include a hot vegan meal. Please refer to the following suggestions when booking your tickets:
No spare income - pay what you can! £1+
Low spare income - £5
Medium spare income - £10 (actual cost of producing the event)
High spare income - £15
Supporter ticket - £20+
Speakers
Mimi Lawrence is a multi-disciplinary artist and composer from Cornwall, based near Penryn. They perform as The Worm and Goblet. They also write short stories and plays. Mimi will be reading accompanying text from their new album 'Elfgiffu House' with recorder playing. Elfgiffu makes a record of their current circumstances and describes their life in a rural granite valley in the future.
Chloe Bonfield is a painter who also works with sound and installation. Her figurative studies begin in the studio, en plein air, or are drawn from found imagery. She captures the awkward, in-between expressions of her human subjects; often caught gazing elsewhere, to some unseen place. They appear adrift in forests or suspended within domestic interiors, their dislocated presence echoing a kind of quiet dissociation. These figures reflect the inner landscape of caregiving. The fleeting escapist fantasies that offer brief refuge amid the intensity of daily domestic life, moments that float between deep presence and the need for self-soothing retreat.
In 2026 Chloe is working on a loose thematic of Strange Dreams, calling on collaborators and participants to describe their synthesisic dreams of place and belonging. Entering into weird contracts in other people's sounds, utterings and whispers. Wondering what sort of materials these will become when making sound pieces to surround her paintings and sculptures, calling into question consent, authorship and shared ideas.
Maria Christoforidi is an AfroGreek artist, writer, and Fine Art lecturer at Falmouth University. Maria’s work moves in different formats – lectures, performances, workshops, poems, film, photography - by listening to the inner body and 'speaking nearby' archives or ancestors. Using speculative fiction, academic research, and collaboration as tools, Maria's images and words aim to reimagine and interrogate archives, refusing narratives by gently peeling back legacies of colonial mind set. Maria is motivated by a hope to create pauses that allow minor stories, dark bodies and more than human comrades to evade classification, come to rest, undoing unspeakable knots of otherness.