I am a socially-engaged visual artist. I work principally with moving image, making standalone artists' film and installations. My work often plays with mainstream and accessible forms – documentary, music video, magazine – so as to move beyond a traditional gallery audience.
I am interested in who makes work, how, why, for whom, and why that matters. I often produce work within a discrete community or interest group, making work with a personal connection to my collaborators and broader social relevance. I want to celebrate and make visible the joy of the making process itself and explore its value for individual and collective growth and change. I develop processes to enable diverse groups of people to make work together. This focus is mirrored in the subject matter of my work, which deals with themes around our social environment and relationships with one another.
Details of shows, talks, teaching, awards etc lives here.
Curatorial work lives here.
My film work is produced by satellite, an artist-led production company.
In 2020 I set up artists’ imprint bored.of.works.
I occasionally assist other artists and friends in a technical capacity - as Director of Photography, experimental film consultant, photographer, that kind of thing. Details of that work lives here.
2023
An Intermission acquired by Arts Council England for the National Art Collection (UK)
2022
Selected - Lodestars - Film London (London, UK)
Prophecy - Mead Gallery (Coventry, UK)
2021
Jury Member - International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) (Amsterdam, NL)
Aesthetica Art Prize - longlist (UK)
Baltic Open (Gateshead, UK)
2020
Bloomberg New Contemporaries (UK)
Trellis Commission - UCL Culture (London, UK)
International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA): Best Children’s Documentary Award - Jury Special Mention (Amsterdam, NL)
Gasworks Residency (London, UK)
2019
British Film Institute (BFI)/DocSociety Made Of Truth Award (UK)
Guardian/Joseph Rowntree Foundation Award - Doc/Fest (Sheffield, UK)
Constellations - UP Projects/Flat Time House (London, UK)
2019
Performance with Angharad Davies and Katie Fiore
Part of the Barbican's Life Rewired programme, back in 2019 when the worst future we could imagine was AI going bad or something like that.
Our intention was to critique our collective reliance on big tech, and the futility of trying to escape this, in a way that was playful and fun.
The Barbican’s head of tech told us that the Centre incorporates crazy technologies, of the kind that are common in any big building nowadays, but which they've never really linked up because they can't find an ethical way to do so. Big department stores use these technologies to link your face [CCTV/facial recognition] to your SIM card [so they can track you] to your payment card [checkout terminals] to spy on, and predict, your every move. Whilst doing our own background research we discovered that salt water is a natural signal jammer, and so just by getting salty we could bring the whole system to its knees.
We travelled to the coast and collected two litres of sea water. We worked with Roseanna Skikun and Pete Truin, two musicians specialising in sea shanties, to compose a new piece from the lines of ancient mariners' songs, but which spoke to our contemporary experience of connection and isolation. We gathered our audience in the presence of the sea water and learned to sing it. Finally, we went out to the lake surrounding the Barbican Centre as night fell, sea water in hand, and performed this piece to the lake, thereby inviting it to turn salty and interfere with the centre's multiple tracking technologies. The wifi was crappy for the rest of the night so we knew we'd been successful.
On another plane, the project was a success: we'd gathered a group of strangers for an event about Big Tech, and for two hours no-one looked at their phone, and instead learned to sing in harmony with everyone else, a moment of cathartic togetherness. For that sliver of time we were free of our data overlords because we didn't need them, we had each other.
The only documentation we made was a series of black and white photographs from an entirely clockwork camera. Salt is also a natural fixative, and so I was able to process the film using the seawater. This process takes days rather than the 5 mins of chemical fix, and so many of the scratches and visual abherrations are caused by the film becoming incredibly fragile, whilst interacting with other elements in the water.
Developed as part of Constellations, a year-long programme from FlatTime House and UP Projects
Programmed by The Barbican as part of Life Rewired