Royal Literary Fund: Renu’s newest commissioned piece for ‘Close Up’

In From the Canyons We Create, Renu Arora responds to Frida Kahlo for Close Up, a Royal Literary Fund initiative published by WritersMosaic, bringing two artists into conversation across time who both know what it is for the body to be radically altered by accident and pain, and who both make work in which physical reality is present but never permitted to become the whole story.

Renu’s connection to Kahlo is not based on a simple comparison of suffering; instead, the commission considers what art can make possible when the body has become a site of rupture, scrutiny and limitation, and asks how an artist creates from within that changed landscape without being reduced to it.

Renu’s own life changed in 2017 when she was hit by a bus and became disabled, and her creative practice since then has held the complexity of that experience - trauma and beauty, immobility and imagination, grief and an insistent creative life. In the piece she writes:

“Immobility is not disability, and art, beyond catharsis, is the journey home that every human being is craving.”

The commission sits naturally within Renu’s wider body of work, since The Burgundy Book, her evolving concept album and digitally immersive musical, also uses song, poetic language and storytelling to explore the borderlands between a former life and an unwritten one, and From the Canyons We Create can be both read and heard, allowing Renu’s words to live on the page and through the particular musicality of her own voice.

https://writersmosaic.org.uk/close-up/from-the-canyons-we-create/