The Centre!
Marguerite Carson responds to Kirsty Dunlop’s new novella ‘Centrefolding’
Marguerite Carson is an artist and writer and art worker, they are currently on the Market Gallery committee and have a passion for pilgrims.
‘Centrefolding’ by Kirsty Dunlop, is published by Sincere Corkscrew, 2026
Photo: Marguerite Carson.
Pictured: Centrefolding by Kirsty Dunlop.
Pictured: Centrefolding by Kirsty Dunlop.
“[B]ecause if the city hasn’t been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there creatively.”
So reads Alistair Gray in the centrefold of Centrefolding, amid a crush of language clamouring on the page and labyrinths through Kirsty Dunlop’s astute novella. One wonders what hard work that final word is doing in letting life exist without creativity—we might amend it to “not even its inhabitants live there at all”.
The ‘centrefold’ is the place a magazine flops open to reveal itself most transparently, give over its best and draw you in, splayed wide. Kirsty’s small neat book asks of us, and of the city in which it’s set, what we might find at the centrefold of the city? In the sticky, intimate middle.
In a time of acute threat to the future of Glasgow’s art spaces; a forced dispersal zone around the city centre; in light of the violent policing of the CCA last year, its subsequent closure; and the undermining of longevity within spaces of cultural production as not only desired but fundamentally vital to the health of a city—Centrefolding feels distinctly pressing.
“The camera kept telling me my emotions were angry, angry again, angry with an air of difficulty.”
The Centre! is at the centre of it all. Whirling through a melee of precarity, lost signs, crowds of loiterers, unintelligible corporate speak, and surveillance, the game of smoke and mirrors is lived from within the cloud. Edges and alliances dissolve and reform at a lurching pace as the strategic aims of the Centre! at the centre of the city are never stilled; the locus of power is invisible, ever shifting, all we know is it’s not with the people and everything is drenched in a constant edging of dread.
The Centre!—a thinly veiled analogue for a certain recognisable Glasgow institution—is where everything happens; where everyone wants to work, where if you don’t work you are nothing but a peripheral lurker, and probably facing acute, destructive precarity as a result. The place where research gets the go-ahead, and projects are green-lit. Of course there is no outside.
Swipe-cards garner access to employment, which means you’re an artist, there’s no other way. This is total professionalisation, bureaucracy is the substantive concept proliferate and as such should ring some very loud alarm bells. Against our current backdrop of DIY and alternative spaces being actively erased and penalised for their informality, their alternative structures taken as ‘high risk’ and their political, cultural and community importance discarded in favour of ‘lower risk’ endeavours, those alarm bells ring and ring.
Centrefolding is a novella metabolising Glasgow’s current climate and reflecting it back to us, wrapped in the intimacy and desire of dread, of wanting to be part of something, desperately, even if that something is a hard joke.