Articles

Candy Royalle is often invited to write for various publications. Below is a smattering of some of her favourites. Click on the blue links to be taken through to the full article. Please feel free to get in touch with Candy if you wish to commission a piece. 

Review for Conversations on Runway: Betty Grumble’s LOVE AND ANGER.  “If Iggy Pop and Patti Smith had a love child, and Annie Sprinkle and David Bowie had a love child, and then those two love children made love to each other on a bed of roses, high on acid, rage and love, they would give birth to Emma Maye Gibson’s drag alter ego Betty Grumble. That’s about the closest I can come to trying to describe the glorious, unreal and completely authentically beautiful mess that is the protagonist of LOVE AND ANGER.

Art Almanac: TextaQueen – Between you and Me. Published print and web March 2017. “…for TextaQueen … every question comes back to ideas of colonisation, privilege, power structures, misogyny and sexuality. For those who don’t have to consistently battle the existing power structures, this might seem unfamiliar, but as a woman of colour myself, a lot of what TextaQueen says rings true of my own experiences.”

The Guardian: Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poetry: inspiring those of us who feel like outsiders. Published March 2016. “All my life, I have felt like an outsider with regards to language – in a land for the elite, the white, educated, middle-to-upper classes. Academic writing, a lot of nonfiction, even some investigative journalism, can feel impenetrable. Like language for only a few – a kind of pervasive elitism that persists, articulated in convoluted “in-knowledge” that outsiders like me, born of immigrants & without higher education, can’t access.”

Artshub: Silencing others is a Political Act. Published November 2016. “Cutting $200 million from the arts in Australia and diverting much of the remaining to “high arts” such as ballet and opera is a political act which supports the oppression of people of colour.”

Overland Literary Journal: Here, Queer and Arabic: On the Road to Belonging. Published May 2016. “Stepping off the plane, walking through the airport, the smell that hit was like many developing countries I’d visited – dense, rich, unsterilised. But this time, I was surrounded by people talking in a tongue I could understand and feel (though using it is a constant struggle that requires summoning memories from childhood). Walking through customs, trying to gather the language required to answer their questions.

Daily Life, Fairfax: We need more platforms for Female Artists of Colour. Published March 2016.  “Platforms for women and women of colour were almost non-existent when I was starting out and the idea of diversity seemed like a distant illusion. Even now, events run by and for women of colour are an exception rather than the rule.”