Maisie Wills
(she/her)
Maisie Wills is from Cornwall and is currently based in Glasgow. She has recently been published by JAWS, Strange Region Press, and The Yellow Paper. Maisie most often writes with and about other people. Each work represents a different method of correspondence; between sender and receiver, artist and writer, one friend to another. These others embody friends and intimate relations as well as citations and references. In her work, ekphrastic and epistolary modes are used to locate the moments which evade capture, pulling into focus the incidental to navigate intersecting subjectivities.
24 Letters
Twenty-Four Letters is an epistolary response to three moving-image works by Esmé Haddrill Selman: the blinking at the start of the day (2025), From the Great White Sky (2026) and Ordinary Ruptures (2026). Esmé’s work uses a combination of Super 8, 16mm, archive/found footage and text to explore themes of intimacy and closeness. These films often contain footage of our shared friends.
You saved a blank roll of Super8 for us to use together. I am finally getting my shot. Next stop, Hollywood! I don’t think our film will be finished in time. See, we’re all ideas right now. We are thinking about how a film can be a correspondence between two people—in real time, in past time. You told me to read KS. I did. She says, everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects, impacts suffered or barely avoided. It takes everything we have […] we wish for the simple life that winks at us from someone else’s beautiful flowerbeds. We live a similar life, we are glancing through each other’s flowerbeds, attuning to each other’s way of seeing things. I will shoot: cracking my window open in the morning to let the breeze in, wiping the stove before you are awake, S under the sheets when I leave for work, a conversation with friends about ideas (always ideas), drawing a diagram of how it will all come together, the train as it pulls in and I can step off directly in front of the footpath leading to our house. We dream of getting by, getting on track. We dream of moving on, moving through. You will shoot: something through a window, the light dancing on the bathtub, something poetic, the back of a lover, the hands of a friend, something which will remind me why we have come to know each other. It will be better than mine. But that will make me happy. She says, and the charged particularity of objects, images, and events encountered framed the importance of making implicit things matter. Another says, does it matter? I say, yes, I think this might matter. You say, show me what you’ve been working on.
Meditations in Another Emergency
Meditations in Another Emergency is a dialogue based on six months of email correspondence between Maisie Wills and Emma Mortimer. It began after we discovered our overlapping interests in Frank O’Hara and the television series Mad Men. Meditations is one iteration of a larger project, one which will continue and evolve.
Ten. We are counting down because something is about to happen. It might be an emergency or it might be the realisation that it is just two people who have come to know each other through emails.
Nine. We watched Don Draper read Meditations in an Emergency in the finale of Season 2 and then everything else followed. We imagined how our paths crossed, like theirs.
Eight. We are showing you how we try to act like other people who we think can understand what is going on.
Seven. We are framing it as poetry so you understand there is something to read between the lines.
Six.
Five. We have learnt that trains show us a double vision.
Four. We have learnt that the Atlantic ocean is shallow.
Three. We are sending you a box.
Two. We are telling you to take a lunch break.
One. We are asking you, what happens now?
Shhh: A Soft Shell Broadcast
Shell to your ear, hold — and listen for the ocean, or is it something else? Stretching across a table, the voices carry. Take a step, listen for the rain. Board at the platform and miss your stop. Keep a score and take notes. The referee blows the whistle; we must be quiet — it is time to go.
Shhh is brought together through a collaborative recording day and later woven together with found sound and music to produce an immersive sonic landscape. The sound work is punctuated with recorded chatter and discussion from the recording booth, a gesture to what can occur through collaboration. The broadcast is based on a series of texts, each at varying points in their process. They are experiments in overlaps, thresholds, and skirting around the edges. Objects appear and reappear in different voices, whilst sounds clatter and whistle through adjacent rooms. This is a translation of text to sound.
With work from Will Farmer, Esther Hesketh, Maisie Wills, Emma Mortimer, Toby Üpson, Beth Emsden, and Sophia Kelly-Keegan.
Shhh will be broadcast as part of Radiophrenia’s open call programme in September 2026.
