Editorial

‘Loneliness is personal, and it is also political,’ writes Olivia Laing in The Lonely City (2016). ‘Loneliness is collective; it is a city.’

Since Satan was first exiled in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), loneliness and its impossibly seductive contours have been the subject of countless works of literature, music, art. A recent example is the 2026 show Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry (2026), at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), which draws its title from the Hank Williams song made famous by Elvis’ haunting 1973 rendition, sung live in Hawaii. 

This project is the product of bringing creative writing students into that gallery space, of asking them—to borrow from John Berger (1972)—to look as an act of choice. The writing that emerged from that looking is not a writing-about nor simply a writing-from but a form of writing-with. It is a dialogue between text and image, writer and artist, material and concept.

As we first began to explore the concept of loneliness, together we created a map, a series of artworks and places and objects that evoke and embody loneliness:

finishing a jigsaw puzzle / being alone at your parent’s house / a shopping centre at close / ‘Fireworks’, Mitski / an op shop toy section / ‘I want you to love me’, Fiona Apple / The Dressmaker / a rusted fidget spinner / ‘Upstream’, Mary Oliver/ grain siloes …

In the process of creating this constellation of affect and artefact, loneliness began to take shape as a shared landscape. Art shows us how, paradoxically, we can be lonely together. It shows us that loneliness is expansive and that it can be generative, too. ‘Loneliness,’ as Ocean Vuong writes in the poem Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong (2015), ‘is still time spent with the world’.

The writing here is an intersection of loneliness and art that reflects the complexity of being human in the world. If loneliness is personal, so too is art. Art is also political. Art is collective; it is a city.

— Sarah Gory

Image credit:

Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry. Installation view. Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2026. Photograph: Andrew Curtis