Woman in Bath

‘Woman in Bath’, set during an encounter between a man and a woman in an art gallery, uses Brett Whiteley’s eponymous artwork as a formal and thematic scaffold. The characters’ interiorities are revealed through layered, affective responses to Whiteley’s art. The work adopts Krauth and Bowman’s (2018) model of ekphrasis as generative of temporal and emotional dissonance, enabling the reader to sense the characters’ shared grief of what will never be. This effect is heightened through the use of first-person apostrophe as a rhetorical strategy to create an elegiac aesthetic. The piece thus offers a model for how ekphrastic literary fiction can explore ambiguous loss through embodied craft techniques of apostrophe and the absence of narrative closure.