Offcuts

Artist Patrick Hartigan recalls the weeks leading to his father’s death and his daughter’s birth. The people he meets, the places he visits, even the objects he touches for a moment, take on a radiance usually seen in artworks we admire. Part visual memoir, part meditation on the colours and contours of life’s events, Offcuts reveals the substance of seemingly mundane moments. With stylistic precision and unreserved sincerity, Hartigan has created a work of art akin to Knausgaard’s My Struggle, with the difference that he has distilled his raw material. ‘Patrick Hartigan writes the same way that he paints: as if the world is standing still and he is walking through it. This is a book of noticing, fragile and fragmented, full of yearning and idiosyncrasy. It is beautiful and in its own way perfect.’ - Erik Jensen, author of Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen and On Kate Jennings.