Sarah Wood, artist, writer and film-maker, shares her cultural faves

What’s the last book you read?

For some reason I always seem to be reading two or three books at the same time so my last book was really two books. The first was Annie Ernaux’s The Years – an exploded autobiography about how the world makes us, both collectively and as individuals, and how we make sense of that making. Utter genius. The second is Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends (An Essay in 40 Questions) about US border policy and how the world works to control us. I can still feel the physical sensation of being caught in it, unable to put it down.

What’s the last film you saw in a cinema?

I just saw Ken Loach’s The Old Oak. It’s about the decline of a mining town and the shifting dynamics that ensue when Syrian refugees are housed there. I’m so pleased I had the chance to watch this story told at scale in the cinema. British cultural thought seems to have been shrunk so far by the assaults of populism that this film was a great reminder about the way that the scale of cinema can open the horizon and permit complexity to unfold rather than be traduced by side-taking. Thank god for Ken Loach! What a beautifully made invitation to think about the way social division is being exploited in the British people. And the ways in which division can heal. The Old Oak is a masterclass in how to use a medium which can easily objectify, to humanise and democratise the image.

Artist and film-maker Sarah Wood.tif (Image: Artist and film-maker Sarah Wood.tif)

What music are you currently listening to a lot?

I’m obsessively listening to Naima Bock’s Giant Palm. What a stunning album. There’s something in Bock’s music that rolls out like an open landscape – a soundscape that has its feet in the metropolitan but its head and heart opening to the wide world beyond. I love the timeless spacious sound she creates.

Vinyl or MP3?

I love the sound of vinyl and I love the immediacy of MP3.

Taylor or Beyoncé?

Beyoncé. Only a goddess and a genius could make Lemonade. I’m very pleased to live through a time when these two women have such power and bring such joy to so many people through the music they make and the messages they transmit. Musical taste is one thing but beyond that – what phenomenons both women are. We are very lucky to have them.

What has been your most formative cultural experience?

As I child I was terribly compelled by David Hockney’s painting Mr And Mrs Clark And Percy. I would request regular trips to the Tate just to spend time in front of the painting so I could try and take in its ambiguity. Obviously I didn’t say it quite like that when I was child. Later I’d understood the story behind the painting, the love tensions between the subjects Ossie Clark and his wife Celia Birtwell and the painter himself, but as a child I just enjoyed the space to sit as an observer and try and work out the mysteries of the adult world. The painting works to keep you outside it while inviting you in. The seduction of the image! This painting made me fall in love with art.

What’s your go-to YouTube video?

Oh, I love watching celebrity interviews from any point in time. I’m not sure why. I suppose I’m attracted to glamour and the glimpse of the real behind it.

What album haven’t you managed to get around to yet but will when you have the time?

Little Simz. I know I’m going to love her last two albums but I’m sort of saving them.

What was the most memorable recent theatre show you saw?

Kae Tempest’s Paradise. It was the first piece of theatre I saw after lockdown unlocked. I remember how unusual and nerve-wracking it felt to be back inside a close room with that many strangers after being in isolation for so long. The play was stunning. It’s a retelling of Sophocles’ Philoctetes – the story of a war-hero who has lived in exile for many years. The world comes back to call on him and brings back the past like a landslide. The perfect play to see in this moment – all the complexity translated through an incredible central performance by Lesley Sharp. The play ended on a moment of perfect coalescence only to be complemented by another perfect moment – the moment when the audience broke into applause. We hadn’t heard that collective sound for so long. What a moment. It was so moving. Theatre at its best. We were absolutely all in it together.

Who or what do you always turn off?

All radio. A voice without image makes me fall asleep instantly.

You’re in a station or airport ahead of a journey. What magazine do you grab?

TANK magazine. Always stylish, always sending me in the direction of something culturally invigorating.

Favourite living author?

Ali Smith. It’s quite something, to be so close to someone, think you know everything about them and still be totally surprised and blown away with the art they make. Ali does that for me with every single book.

Recommend a novel …

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner – an invitation to imagine everything differently

Favourite actor?

There are so many wonderful actors but the actor who I’ve appreciated more and more as I’ve grown older is Ingrid Bergman. Hitchcock said he thought Ingrid Bergman of all his leading ladies was the most perfect because she always wore gloves. When I first read that I thought this was just about sartorial elegance but growing older watching her films at different points in life I realise he’s saying something much more about her facility to be present in every single performance she gives. To be new, clean really, in everything she does to permit a truly adult sensibility to surface through her performances. She allows herself to be a grown up. So much acting is about seduction, often quite coy seduction. Bergman uses her beauty not as a device to win the audience but a surface through which some of the most painful and difficult human emotions can arise. It’s really stunning. I admire her so much.

… and song?

So hard to choose one. I think I have to choose two: Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River and Shirley Scott singing Elton John’s Your Song. In fact that’s quite interesting because both songs are rare opportunities to hear either artist sing.

If you’re a fan of graphic novels, what’s the best one you’ve ever read?

Woodrow Phoenix’s Rumble Strip. Such beautiful stylish drawings offsetting such a sophisticated, necessary text.

Recommend a film …

I recommend Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. For years I couldn’t watch The Shining all the way through because all its scary cinematic tricks terrorised me too much. Then I was on a residency in the Kubrick archive and the archivist who was seemingly the last person to recommend a horror film said she thought it was a very sad film. A sad film? I tried to watch it again with that proviso in mind and realised that if I stopped squinting at the film from behind a cushion she was right. It’s really a brilliant version of how family life falls apart. How men and women slip into roles they inherit as tensions that arise in the dynamic between parent and child provoke people to act in ways they don’t really understand. We’re all haunted houses. The discomfort Kubrick’s film provokes is really its gift.