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INTERPRETIVE ESSAY ON FLOWER AND ED ATKINS
Irina Tevdoradze
“Communication is the key” is something we hear almost daily. But what if language is also the reason the lock exists in the first place?
Language allows us to understand each other, yet it constantly fails to fully express what we feel. Something is always lost between experience and articulation. Written language is made up of gaps as much as it is of words. These spaces are not empty. They carry rhythm, hesitation, and meaning. Just as in speech, where pauses and silences shape what is being said, what is not expressed often holds as much weight as what is.
Ed Atkins’ work seems to exist exactly in that space where language begins to fail. Flower, his first non-fiction book, does not attempt to fix this failure. It moves directly into it. The text does not explain feelings, it produces them. It feels less like reading and more like being placed inside a mind that is thinking in real time.
What makes the book stay is its rawness. It is like very cold water taken directly from a spring. It is refreshing, but it also burns. It leaves a sensation that lingers and that you want to return to. Atkins shapes his work around something that resists full understanding and rather than controlling it, he follows it. It feels less like a finished statement and more like a process of searching, a kind of research without method, a deep dive into experience itself.
This is what makes Flower bold. Not only because it explores where language fails, but because of how far he is willing to expose himself within that failure. There is no distance, no protection. He presents thoughts and feelings in an unprocessed state, fully aware that this openness can be uncomfortable, even judged. But that risk is part of the work. It is what allows something real to appear.
One thought kept returning to me while reading the book: did he sit down, start writing, and simply not stop? The whole text feels like it was written in a single breath. Not the kind that becomes unbearable, where you start grasping for air, but something calmer. As if he stopped breathing for a moment, wrote everything out and then stood up and continued with his day.
At the same time, the book cannot be read like that. It contains too much. Too many details, thoughts, and fragments, some seemingly useless, others that stay with you. You cannot take it in all at once. It demands to be read in portions. Just like you cannot drink water directly from a spring in one go without it hurting. You have to slow down, take it in carefully, and let it stay.
This essay focuses primarily on Flower, but approaches it in relation to selected works by Atkins, particularly his CGI pieces, following the connections that begin to appear between them. Through this, it returns to language as the underlying structure that binds everything together, shaping how these works exist, connect and are experienced, while still never fully containing what they try to express.
The book reads as a single, continuous voice. At first, it is easy to assume that this voice belongs directly to Atkins himself. However, it does not fully settle into that certainty. Even though he describes Flower as his first non-fiction work, this does not necessarily mean that it is simply about him. It feels less like a direct self-portrait and more like something shaped, assembled and slightly displaced.
At the same time, one of the most sharp aspects of the book is how visual it is. Even though it revolves so strongly around language, it constantly produces images. You do not only follow the voice, you begin to see what it describes. Certain moments remain almost physically present. For me, the image of a sandwich pinned to a corkboard stayed long after reading, as if it had been fixed somewhere in my mind.
This points to what defines the reading experience more broadly. The emotional weight of the text does not arise from meaning in a direct sense, but from the way it is built. Syntax becomes central. Sentences unfold in a way that produces feeling before it produces clarity, so that meaning seems to arrive almost as a by-product. This same logic appears in his CGI works. In both cases, structure carries the emotional charge. Everything begins to circle back to language, not just as a tool for expression, but as a system that shapes how experience is constructed and perceived.
His texts often feel like two realities happening at the same time. One is the world inside the work. The other is the world outside it: traffic, voices, the dull noise of daily life. They do not blend. They sit on top of each other, like two metal pipes laid side by side. At first they remain separate. Over time, through small touches and erosion, they begin to affect one another. Still distinct, but no longer untouched.
The same dynamic appears in his videos, especially Warm, Warm, Warm, Spring Mouth. Everything feels carefully constructed, yet the flow constantly pulls you in and then pushes you back out. Just when you begin to sink into the world on the screen, something interrupts the illusion and returns you to the present. It becomes a space where you cannot fully disappear. Each return feels slightly altered, even if the change is difficult to locate.
This movement between immersion and interruption reflects a broader logic in his work. His thinking feels like a hive. To an untrained eye, the activity appears chaotic, but there is structure within it. He does not avoid confusion, but moves toward it, as if clarity alone is not enough. In one of his interviews, he recalls reading his father’s diary, where he describes loving poetry while often not understanding it. Where this lack of understanding frustrated his father, Atkins seems to find something productive in it. The less he understands, the more alive the experience becomes.
This hive-like logic appears on the page as well. In one passage he writes:
“I like making whatever bad thing irredeemable because I don’t trust future me to be consistent with current me. I know I’m inconsistent and this can be frightening. Self-love is an unobservable phenomenon that cavils forever. I should be punished but not killed outright. I bought a big bag of Doritos in Blackheath in the morning and started eating them in rough stacks outside the shop. I then sharpish turned and emptied the rest into a bin there and used the empty Dorito bag as a shiny mitt to force the Doritos deep into the bin. Everything else in the bin groaned and shifted downward.”
The jump from a dense, abstract reflection on self and punishment to something as physical and absurd as forcing Doritos into a bin is what gives the passage its force. Instead of explaining emotion, the text lets it exist alongside trivial actions. Both carry weight, and both occur at the same time.
For me, this passage carries a thin, almost metallic melancholy. It seems to emerge from the way the syntax unfolds. After the sentence about the Doritos, he remains with the snack for almost a page, then shifts to cheese puffs, then to vaping, dwelling each time with the same intensity. You begin to question the accumulation of these details. Why am I being given all this seemingly useless information? Is daily life not already full of things we never asked to know? Yet gradually, it becomes calming. You find yourself inside someone else’s mind, either escaping your own or quietly comparing it to theirs.
The vaping passage makes this especially clear. It shows how small, banal behaviour can become a site of tension and self-awareness.
“I palm the vape like an inmate. I ensure the little glowing display’s hidden. I look straight at anyone nearby so if they try looking at me they’ll be met by my gaze before they see that I’m vaping so that they’ll immediately look away. I pull on the vape and hold it in for as long as possible so that the vapour dissipates in me. By the time I breathe out there’s no giveaway vape cloud.”
People are usually not this aware of their own habits. Most movements are automatic. Here, thought becomes visible action. Language is stretched and bent, yet it remains fluid. This tension runs through the entire book.
The book can be understood as a structure with a clear beginning and end, but within that frame something unstable unfolds. It does not move toward explanation or resolution in a traditional sense; instead, it creates a space for exploration. The opening and closing do not fully belong to what lies between them, nor do they seem to signal to one another. What connects the fragments is not a linear narrative or a closed loop, but a shared movement of thought where reader and narrator briefly meet.
To make sense of this, I began to think of it as a diagram:
It starts at an arbitrary point in time and moves through a structure similar to a hive. Ideas that initially appear disconnected begin to cross and touch. Not everything connects, but nothing remains entirely isolated. From this, something larger begins to form. Not a single meaning, but a system that continues to generate new lines of thought. It grows less like a linear argument and more like a branching structure, expanding rather than resolving.
One of the things I respect most in Atkins’ work is the consistency of this logic across different mediums. Language remains central. In writing, it appears through syntax. In his CGI works, through timing, sequencing, sound and image.
As Atkins mentions in one of his interviews, he believes in people, in humans and their emotions. It does not matter how fake the route is. If the result is that someone feels something, then the goal has been met. I think the final stroke of his works is the viewer. Without someone there to experience them, nothing would really be alive. This is why he keeps snapping the audience in and out of the illusion. If you disappeared into it completely, there would be no one left to feel anything.
That is also why reading Flower feels more like a conversation than like a typical book. Even though you are physically in ordinary place, your mind is somewhere else, sitting with the narrator, moving through his thoughts. It almost feels as if he is waiting for you to answer back.
But the reader and the work still have to remain separate, just like the metal pipes mentioned earlier. They touch and affect each other, but they do not merge into one. Moving through Atkins’ work feels like being in a soft phase of sleep, where you are not in REM but not fully awake either. That is why he has to pull you back. Like holding a thin thread while walking through a labyrinth, so you do not get lost inside it. Because if you do get lost in it, the work would become empty.
Flower is a kind of horcrux. Not in a fantasy sense, but in the sense that it holds part of Atkins’ inner life outside his body. When he calls it his first non-fiction book, it sounds almost modest, but once you open it, that label becomes heavy. The book is raw. It is frightening, not only because of what it reveals, but because some of its truths are so exposed that you want to look away. You recognize yourself in certain passages and start asking uncomfortable questions. Why do I feel this. Am I like this. Is this what being a person actually means.
Even if the voice in the book is not entirely identical with Atkins himself, this does not make it less honest. If anything, it makes it more so. The self that appears in Flower feels assembled rather than singular, shaped not only by personal experience but by everything that passes through it. In that sense, the book is not simply revealing a person, but exposing the process through which a person is formed. And it is precisely this lack of protection, this refusal to isolate a stable identity, that makes the work feel so direct.
What runs through all of this is a thin, quiet melancholy. Not dramatic sadness, but something flatter and colder, like a background hum. Shame and fear quietly organize how we live. Flower moves directly inside that space. This is where it connects to Atkins’ CGI works. In the videos, he creates figures that cannot feel, but desperately try to. In Flower, he gives us the opposite: a voice overflowing with everything those digital bodies are missing, yet still never quite satisfied.
Both forms circle the same failure. Language cannot fully hold emotion. Images cannot either. Even when Atkins strips himself down in writing, exposing things that feel almost indecent to share, something still slips away. Meaning never fully arrives. That gap is where the melancholy lives. And it is also where the reader falls into the work and completes it.
In one passage Atkins writes: “Being realistic enough to the world and to myself is as close as it currently feels I can get to an externally relatable reality as a condition of truth, so it is that blasphemously modelled grief is similarly basically real, and the scandalization subs for very real grief in my feelings sometimes. Feelings can do that, can’t they, they can sub for one another. Depending on the current vivacity of belief stock, writing this feels vile.”
What hits here is not that this is fictional or performative, but that it is too aware of itself. He knows he is modeling grief. He knows he is substituting one feeling for another. And that knowledge makes the feeling feel compromised.
This is exactly the tension that runs through his CGI work. He calls those figures dead bodies, things that cannot feel, yet we still feel for them. We project sadness, longing, vulnerability onto them even while we are being shown that none of it is real. The emotion does not disappear just because we know it is fake. It becomes stranger. More fragile. More desperate.
This is where Atkins seems to exist. In the space where you know how the trick works, but still want the magic. Once you have seen behind the curtain, you cannot return to innocence. So you begin to look for stronger sensations, more extreme forms of feeling, just to get close to something that still registers.
This is why feelings begin to replace each other in Flower. One form of grief can stand in for another. Shame can stand in for pain. They are not lies, but attempts. Ways of checking whether something still registers, whether something still hurts.
In the end, everything returns to language. The words begin to make sense, and yet something continues to escape them. As the book unfolds, meaning gives way to feeling, and what begins as an exploration of language becomes an experience of it.
It is easy to say that language fails here. But language and feeling are not separate. They shape one another. Words produce feeling, and feeling reshapes words in return. One emerges from the other. If something burns, it is because there was something there to burn in the first place.
What appears as failure may simply be this movement between them. Not a breakdown, but a process that does not end in clarity, but continues to unfold.
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