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)
2023-present
Over Autumn 2023 I worked with groups of young people in Alternative Provision in Tower Hamlets to make work that spoke to their experiences and identities, exploring issues of power, perception, art, mental health and education. In December 2023 we held an exhibition together in a vacant shop which we transformed into a gallery.
Supported by: Chisenhale Gallery, London East Alternative Provision
Funded by: Arts Council England, Freelands Foundation, Action for Bow
Install photography showing first Never Sleep exhibition in Chisenhale Project Space, 2023
H Is For Hostile Environment is a moving image work made in collaboration with researcher Dr Keren Weitzberg. The work aims to provide a space for people who have suffered under the UK’s border regime to speak about their experiences, whilst also celebrating the rich contribution that people who’ve moved to the UK from overseas have made to our shared social and cultural life.
The work comprises 26 sections, each made in collaboration with a partner who has first-hand experience of the issues at hand. Each section is developed, and then collaboratively made, together.
The Hostile Environment is the name given by then-Home Secretary Theresa May to a basket of government policies which aimed to co-opt large parts of UK society into policing the UK’s borders - from doctors to landlords, employers, homeless services and more. The policy had the stated aim of combatting ‘illegal immigration’ but had real-world, devestating effects on the lives of many thousands of people who live in the UK with migrant heritage. Its most notorious effect was the Windrush Scandal, where large numbers of people of Caribbean heritage, who had lived in the UK for decades and should have enjoyed full citizenship rights, were barred from employment, healthcare, education, benefits and more, and faced mass deportation at the hands of the Home Office.
The film was exhibited at much-loved community venue the Rio Cinema, Dalston, by Chisenhale Gallery, and at UCL East.
Supported by: UCL Culture, Arts Council England
film trailer
production stills from H is for Hostile Environment
2018-20
Since summer 2018 I’d been spending time with a group of young people (14-21) in Stoke on Trent, UK, who were experiencing homelessness.
At the centre of the project is an artists’ film made in collaboration with that group of young participants. The intention was to make a work that spoke to an audience who are not familiar with their way of life, and for the group to feel represented on screen in a genuine way.
I taught members of the group how to use high-end film equipment, which we often operated together. Alongside this I led informal workshops in photography and creative writing, and participants documented their own lives using 35mm photography, showing what they’d done to the rest of the group each week. We watched films about homelessness and precarity, and talked about the way people in that situation are represented. Participants led a small tour of places that had meaning for them around the city, curated a public exhibition in a city centre art gallery, and wrote bits of text to those in the outside world who haven’t experienced the things that they have.
The overwhelming feeling I had from the young people who took part was a desire to be seen as human beings - people who laugh, cry, are angry and happy, and who have unique experiences and something to say. Together we tried to make a piece of work which did some justice to that.
The film’s collaboratively-made soundtrack, Intermission Music, is being released as an limited artists’ edition run of 500 vinyl records with all profits going to young people who’ve experienced homelessness.
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
2018
A prototype for a series of publications about socially engaged art making, How to Take a Photograph is an illustrated, ~48-page artists' publication. Appearing at first to take the form of a technical instruction manual, it weaves practical information together with an open and accessible introduction to theory around socially engaged art making. A work in progress was exhibited as an installation during SPACE studios/LCN Artists' Showcase, so that feedback might be incorporated into the finished work.
2013-2020
in 2013 I moved to London with the aim of starting a cinema that would be a meaningful contribution to a community, enhancing access not just to culture but to making decisions about culture, and a contribution to the wider capital’s film ecology.
I assembled a small group of people who were interested in setting up a cinema along the lines described. We identified a building in Deptford which had been derelict for fifteen years or so - the location was important because Deptford is in Lewisham, which at the time was one of only two London boroughs with no dedicated cinema of any kind. I designed a model which would allow us to take a long-term commercial lease over the building, renovate it for our purposes and then to operate as a non-heirarchical volunteer-run arts organisation. We carried the first stages of the plan out as a small group, but the aim was to grow the organisation into a large group of volunteers from the local borough and across the city who would build and operate the cinema together.
On 12th July 2014 we held our first public meeting, where the project was outlined to a group of 50 or so volunteers who were in attendance. From that date onwards we held weekly public meetings, initially using a consensus methodology I had based upon work at the Star and Shadow Cinema (Newcastle Upon Tyne) and other projects, and slowly adapting this model to the needs of the group and our activities.
Over the following year the building was renovated including a 40-seat screening room, bar/social space and ancilliary facilities. Almost every aspect of this was undertaken by a growing group of volunteers, numbering nearly 1000 people who had been involved in some capacity or another by the time the first stage of construction was complete. I brought in friend and architect David Dobereiner who worked with the group on the initial plans, which were then adapted by the group into a practical model which could pass building control and be carried out.
Parallel to this building work we set up a programming group, where we developed methods for programming a venue together based upon co-operative, non-heirarchical principles. The first screenings took place on the ground floor of the venue whilst it was a building site, and were used primarily as a way to get people involved in the organisation. Once the screening room was complete it became much easier to constantly programme, and the cinema moved from being an organisation in set-up to a functioning cinema with constantly improving facilities.
We also developed ways to run the organisation together. The weekly meetings were the heart of this - open public events where every key decision about the operation of the cinema is made, and where every attendee has an equal say over the cinema’s operation.
Over the next few years the organisation continued to develop: programming increased from a very early average of one screening a week to a full programme with films and events every night of the week. We fostered partnerships with organisations across the city and far beyond, and won numerous awards for our programming and organisation. We successfully raised money through numerous rounds of crowdfunding and public grants to improve the building’s facilities, the quality of film projection, our community work and more.
The cinema became a much-loved part of London’s film ecology, celebrated locally and across the city, and known for its work much further afield. Volunteers made the decision to close it permanently during the 2020 pandemic, when the close physical community it was designed to foster was not possible.