The Balls of Alban

‘St. Alban and I were playing strip poker but neither of us had any cards. We both sat there, balls out. Me, because I was losing. Him, well he just turned up like that...’

Gripping and singularly anachronistic, The Balls of Alban continues Carl Gent’s ludic project to rehistoricise and refictionalise the sidelined figure of Cynethryth, eighth century Queen of Mercia. Part riotous short story, part historical survey, Gent’s work is a subversive excavation of how we tell stories and the Anglo-Saxon imaginary.

Carl Gent is an artist and writer from Bexhill-on-sea. They have exhibited their sculptures, songs, vehicles, and printouts at Jupiter Woods, Flatland Projects, Wysing Arts Centre, ICA, Somerset House, Goldsmiths CCA, the De La Warr Pavilion and the Museum for English Rural Life. Felon Herb, an iteration of their ongoing manufacture of absinthe as art, was published by Kelder Press in 2022, and in 2021 All Us Girls Have Been Dead for So Long, the script to their climate-apocalypse musical extravanganza co-produced with Linda Stupart, was published by Arcadia Missa.

Designed by Joe Haigh / Chaosmos Studios.