Heterotopic and Holey Spaces as Tents for the Nomad: Rereading Gwen John’s Letters

In this article I look into the letters and paintings of the expatriate Welsh artist Gwen John, tracing her spatial practices in the urban spaces of modernity. Drawing on Foucault’s, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s analytics, I argue that John’s spatial narratives chart heterotopias and holey spaces that challenge the hegemonic spaces of modernity, temporarily giving shelter to what Braidotti has theorized as female nomadic subjects. John’s fluid spatiality is thus conceived as an event that interrogates static conceptualizations of spaces and identities and foregrounds difference, movement and forces of desire as constitutive of the real.