Acknowledgements

Our editorial work began during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We thank all our contributors for their patience during this time. Throughout, we remained confident in what was taking shape: our future, collective book. The manuscript-in-becoming was energised by the conference that preceded it, which took place across multiple venues in Manchester in February 2019. And yet we found it taking on a life of its own in the process of its composition, meeting new contributors (writers, artists, scholars) and forming new bonds and collaborations.

Many people and publishers deserve our thanks here. Firstly, our deepest gratitude to our writers in these pages for their distinctive and original mobilisations and (re)imaginations of gesture, of what it can do, in form and in content. We thank Alicia J. Rouverol, our expert co-organiser on the conference whose commitment to advancing the field of creative-critical writing helped to drive the project forward. We also thank those contributors to the first live iteration of Gestures, who were not able to contribute to the book. We thank the inimitable Kaye Mitchell for being an early, committed, and generous supporter of our iterative project on gesture and our collaborative work. We extend our gratitude to Erin Manning for providing generous and encouraging feedback on the book’s development. We also offer our boundless thanks to our editors at Manchester University Press: Lucy Burns, Emma Brennan, and Alun Richards, for supporting this hybrid body of work. The anonymous readers of the proposal and manuscript provided generous, sensitive, and insightful comments that helped shape the book’s final form; huge thanks go to them. We’re also very grateful to artists and libraries who provided images, especially those who generously waived permissions and licensing fees. We thank them for their support and understanding, which has helped us to produce this book in its most desirable, visual form. We thank Carol Mavor for her support and vision, and for seeing Georgia O’Keefe’s hands.

We are also grateful to publishers of extracted or reshaped works included here that have previously appeared elsewhere in different forms. Extracts of Maria Fusco’s ‘My skin is a riot: critical and embodied writing about living in co-occupation with a chronic health condition’ were previously published as ‘ECZEMA!’ in Critique: The Stakes of Form (Diaphanes, 2020). Daniela Cascella’s chapter ‘My chimeras’ revisits and combines sections from two books: Chimeras: A Deranged Essay. An Imaginary Conversation. A Transcelation (Sublunary Editions, 2022) and Nothing As We Need It: A Chimera (Punctum Books/Risking Education, 2022).

Colleagues, collaborators, and friends have given us motivation and inspiration when we needed it. Alice would like to thank Gemma Blackshaw, Melayna Lamb, and her writing group (Carol Mavor, Fatema Abdoolcarim, and Rebecca Hurst) for their encouragement, feedback, and ideas on and with gesture. Alice would also like to thank the Royal College of Art’s Research Office for support; also, the Paul Mellon Centre and the Terra Foundation’s Centre for American Art at The Courtauld for providing invaluable research time to work on the book. Hilary and Nell would both like to thank Kaye Mitchell for generous and insightful PhD supervision. Hilary would like to thank Renee Gladman for sharing the artwork included in her essay here; we would all like to thank Renee Gladman for the hand she has played in this project, for being with us in Manchester in 2019, and for the ways her work has continued to inspire the thinking in this book. Finally, Hilary would like to thank Sarah Bernstein for introducing her to opacity.

We’d like to thank our families and loved ones for helping make space for this book to blossom, come into that material form. Alice, in particular, would like to thank Josh Malby.

Lastly, we’d like to extend the deepest of thanks to each other for turning an editorial project on gesture into an editorial project with gesture: a beautiful practice of shared reading, writing, talking, and listening. It felt rhythmic and haptic working this way, a space between verbal languages. The gesture entered our lives.

In memory of Lauren Berlant (1957–2021)