Writer in Residence

Writer in Residence take the form of a TV-style interview and continues Sutcliffes interest in collage as a means by which to shake certainty and to surreptitiously undermine. Sutcliffe poses the melancholic hallucination that is Adrian Leverkuhns meeting with the Devil in Thomas Manns Doctor Faustus (1947) in direct counterpoint to the conception of positive existentialism presented by Colin Wilson in his novel The Outsider (1956) – a philosophical standpoint that was, in turn, developed through Wilsons own critique of Leverkuhns meeting with the Devil.

Sutcliffe returns to his characteristic theme of (artistic) self-doubt, expressed in terms of a monologists interior dialogue , which extracts symptoms and provides prognoses, remedies and worst-case scenarios. This neurotic experience of artistic production, often felt but rarely admitted, is more broadly a metaphor for the uneasy relationship between established and emergent voices and, as such, feeds his interest in class and autodidacticism , evident in other works such as Well Let You Know.

Writer in Residence was commissioned for Frieze Film 2010