I’ve never met, emailed or spoken with the artist Duncan MacAskill but when, a few years ago, we were rehearsing Hamlet at the Almeida, postcards from him started to arrive in the rehearsal room. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was part of a decades-long project in which MacAskill sends postcard-size original artworks in the mail – sometimes paint or ink, sometimes collage, sometimes text (often anagrams of the phrase ARTIST IN RESIDENCE) on wood or card. I love them – and the surprise of receiving them – and I love the openness and generosity of the gesture: art that flies off from the artist to an unseen destination. One arrived last week in the rehearsal room of The Doctor, my final Almeida show, like a little talisman from a friend I’ve never met.
18 August 2019
