Nicola McEvoy

Writing

Extract from A Ritual in Television Alchemy zine, 2022.

Nicola McEvoy: Artist Interview

in Water & Metaphors, Collect Art

꧁☥꧂

  • Writing and zine-making is a central part of my practice, as I am interested in how the production of these textual materials produce ‘opacity’ for marginalised groups (Glissant, 1990), constituting their own worlds or reality systems. The sharing of occult knowledge has historically been done through self-organised and secretive channels, where social experimentation could flourish. My work follows in the tradition of Thee Temple of Psychick Youth’s 1989 pamphlet, Television Magick, which suggests how one might repurpose TV as an instrument of magick.

  • “Nicola McEvoy: Artist Interview”, in Water & Metaphors / Special Edition, vol 92, 21 January 2026, by Collect Art, Tbilisi, Georgia. p. 29-34. [Link]→

  • Water, Venus, Mercury, Black Sulfur, Eject. [Link]→

  • ꧁ Abstract ꧂

    Haunted. We are. In this reality, shaped by the symbolic order of capitalism, the ghost of a maternal surface emerges when we sleep; the original screen that covers the void upon which reality is structured. Sleep is a desire to regress to this infantile state, but dream is the subject’s attempt to stop the breaks, glitches and slippages into the realm of becoming.

    In this practice-based thesis, I explore the similarities between the structure upon which the ‘white wall’ of the ‘faciality machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari) is scribed, and the ‘dream screen’ (Lewin) in which moving-image is projected. This ontological deconstruction provides a magickal apparatus that transforms CRT TV into a techno-neoshamanic medium. Generating new cosmogonies, like pirate TV stations, to access alternative modes of being and relating.

    Using an auto-ethnographic methodology, my life as a disgruntled barista is transfigured into liquid ‘probe head’ disseminator, as I explore the cavity of the mouth as the site of dream. Divining ghosts of the feminine to disrupt the capitalist regime.

    Royal College of Art Research Biennale 2023 [Link]→

  • In progress…