Review: Meg Parrott, 'On Heat' by Joely Mae Greally
Tenderness; emotional charge; what powers Joely Mae Greally as an artist and writer is the same as that of her debut monograph, On Heat: Accidental Cruisers. Navigating the slippery architectures of love, grief and queer remembrance, On Heat is less interested in documenting relationships. Rather, it is an erotic, heady study of preserving their texture. It asks what remains after intimacy has passed, and how memory itself can become a form of home. It is a book that lingers in what remains – the weight of love, and the traces it leaves behind. Here, longing becomes a material condition. “It’s free form art writing,” she says, “whilst holding my two fingers up.” All sentiment, with no holds barred. Where queerness has so often been imagined through transient encounters and borrowed spaces, On Heat instead sits in the domestic. Set between a pre-gentrified Manchester, Berlin and the Spanish coast, hotel rooms, dive bars and beaches remain as waypoints. The book keeps travelling, but emotionally, its content circles back to the same question: how do you leave evidence that love truly happened?
Revealed in the documenting of quieter rituals: empty beds, abandoned shoes, sprawled hands, these become sites where kinship is rehearsed and remade. For a community that has historically found family beyond the nuclear unit – around shared meals, smoke-filled pubs and the glass-laden tables of dyke bars – Greally understands domesticity not as a fixed destination, but as something continually built and redefined between people. Traversing from the carnal heat of sexual desire to the heavy heads and slow steps of heartbreak, vignettes of past lovers, lesbian aunties and departed sisters are folded into an evolving archive of the chosen family. Rather than romanticising queer transience, On Heat dwells on the desire to stay: to make a home of another body, a conversation, a ritual, or a room. The result is a quiet act of reclamation. For lives so often pushed into secrecy or reduced to stereotype, Greally offers another record: one that commemorates queer existence in all its contradictions, locating beauty not only in desire, but in hurt; healing; and the everyday.
The book is resolute. Weighty, firm. Between fuschia bindings, the stories inside mirror the passionate hue that sandwiches them. Its gilded title, catching the light before yielding to pages detailing what slips often from view: grief. Each sub-chapter acts like a small invocation; part confession, part elegy, part love letter. The materiality of the object echoes its emotional register; tender yet tough, delicate without being ornamental. On Heat asks to be held as much as it asks to be read. Greally's literary voice is a steadfast one. It is a dissemination of sensitivity. Yet, written with unwavering conviction and little interest in emotional restraint.
Both a eulogy to the past and an ode to the possibility of queer futures, Greally invites the reader to see our bygone years as sites of learning, and those to come, as ones of hope.
She writes in order to feel. Arguably, the strongest and most human spur a writer can possess. “Whilst waiting for you I lost myself…” she writes, and in turn, offers a piece of her heart on paper. Lamentable and glimmering in equal measure, On Heat disseminates not only what may have been lost for queers, but what remains for us: the enduring possibility of becoming and returning to oneself.
Joely Mae Greally is an artist, writer, researcher & devotee. Their works encompass language, moving image, performance, printed matter, sound, video & archive. https://www.instagram.com/joelymaegreally/
Reviewer: https://www.instagram.com/mgprrtt/?hl=en
Portrait of artist photographer: https://www.instagram.com/evelouisaa/
