MY PRACTICE

I have always been drawn to the spaces between things; between places, people and ideas, and the work of connection across absence. My interest lies with liminality as method and as form. The throughline in my practice is transformation as a moving between states, and how we move through emotional states, particularly in and out of grief. I return to thresholds, to places and moments of in-between, drawn through different bodies of work and have re-mapped city spaces pocked with threat at dusk and dawn, using tilt-shift to collapse scale and pull new stories out of feared places. I have long been interested in what it means to be in space as a woman, and how fear and grief are embedded in that experience of place.

My preoccupation with the liminal grew out of my background in theatre, performance and live art, and has been fuelled by process-driven artists whose projects are disparate and varied: Jeremy Deller, Graeme Miller, Steve McQueen, and Janet Cardiff. It has been shaped too by those preoccupied with space itself, public and private, from Patrick Keiller, Rachel Whiteread and George Chakravarthi to Cornford & Cross. Alan Read's Civic Centre, an extraordinary five-day event across London, showed me how civic space and performance could meet, and festivals by LIFT and SPILL introduced me to the ways storytelling could explode. The principles of coproduction that now shape my filmmaking and art practice came in part out of teaching devising work through the processes and texts of Lloyd Newson of DV8 and Tim Etchells of Forced Entertainment.

Over the course of my research into work like Jeremy Deller's The Battle of Orgreave and Graeme Miller's Linked, my research became my art practice. I investigated the mechanics of coproduction from inside the work. I talked not only to the artists who shaped the direction, but to the people involved at every level: the miners, the performers, the reenactors, Mike Figgis, Artangel, the original interviewees, the facilitating organisations. I learned the deep craft of making work when people's stories are at its centre. This was something quite distinct from work made from testimony, because that wasn't what was happening in Deller's or Miller's direction. Interviewing audiences and artists about how work was made, has embedded a deep-seated fascination with artistic process and how work comes into being.

Current work has been influenced by my residency funded by the Royal Scottish Academy on the Isle of Coll as an enquiry into grief and landscape, and I am currently looking to develop a body of large-format photography and film back there.


Work in development

Royal Scottish Academy Residency
An Cridhe, Isle of Coll, Inner Hebrides

Project using film, sound and engagement with the island community in conversations on grief, healing and the pull of landscape.

Nine Years

This collaborative film made with photographer and painter Nicholas Middleton walks from the south east to the east of London. It starts from what was the Heygate Estate around 2012 in the Elephant and Castle and through to Beckton Alps, the spoil heap in East London near London City Airport, where there was once a dry ski slope opened by the Princess of Wales. It is in post-production.

Geographies of Fear


This project showcases how three photographers, Anthony Carr, Nicholas Middleton and Sarah Wishart use three different photographic processes to open up different anxieties at play in a city’s public spaces.


May - June 2026 Middle Pier 1, The Isle of Coll Royal Scottish Academy

A still from footage from my RSA residency on the Isle of Coll in February 2025, RSA Summer Exhibition - 200th Anniversary

Autumn/Winter 2025 Death Sluice Magazine

May 2025 Here’s where the story ends
Sluice Expo - Seyðisfjörður, Iceland

I use large format photography camera armed sometimes with props to ‘unfrighten’ spaces around spaces I’d been advised not to walk alone, to tell a new story about that space partly by renaming and recontextualising my personal history so as to draw new maps through fable.

May 2025 Co-Director - Sluice Film Festival, Seyðisfjörður, Iceland

The first year of this film festival of artists' moving image, curated and shown at the edge of things.

Summer 2024 How Everything Turns
The Minories, Colchester - Sluice Vernacular

February 2023 Five metres of direction Undertow Group Show, Unit 1 Gallery, London

2021-22 On Getting Out of Stuck - RCS Commission, Scotland

2022 Re-link - Sound Table event with Cornelia Parker, Graeme Miller, Sarah Wishart and inhabitants of ACME housing

2019 Dream Agency Isle of Jersey

Spring/Summer 2019 perform/subvert/transform Sluice Magazine

Spring 2019 Five metres of direction
Sluice Gallery, Hackney

2018 A Provenance of Performance PhD Research - University of Leeds

2018 Homme de Plume Live Art Development Agency - DIY

2017 Chair for 20th Anniversary screening of ‘The Castle’ at the Prince Charles Cinema, London

2016 It Bears Repeating: Catch-phrasing connection and care in The Castle
Screening Australia seminar series - Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London

2015 Linked An Immemorial Research Seminar Graeme Miller & Sarah Wishart, Middlesex University

2013 Being together and being apart Lifting the Curtain – On Audience and Authorship ICA, London
On audience and authorship; who makes the work in the room?

2013 - Nick Cave: The spirit of the Duende and the sound of the rent heart in The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays, Intellect

Grief, performance and the duende; the art of the love song.

2013 - Jeremy Deller’s ‘The Battle of Orgreave’, the work of mourning and the recovery of a lost community in edited collection Digging The Seam Cambridge Scholars Press

How Deller staged a community's grief; and the work of reenactment as recovery.

2012 - Rank Amateurism: Re-enactment, Radicalism and Reaction - Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave -  Performance Studies International conference – Leeds, UK

The performance of re-enactment as radical art.

2012 - Where you are not — the loss of Tom Lubbock’s words First published in English and Croatian in the Performing Arts magazine Frakcija issue no. #58/59 ‘On Being Moved’

2009 - Something’s coming through: art and the spectre’s voice. GHost, Hosting II, Senate House, London

2008 - Lost frequencies: performance, memory and the recharging of site ADSA Conference – Turangawaewae – A Sense of Place, Dunedin, New Zealand

Reactivation and the work of site in holding memory.

2008 - Contested sight – the 2012 Olympics and the politics of vision Performance Studies International PSi 14 conference – Copenhagen, Denmark

2005 - Producer and Curator Oil and Silver - Hoopers Gallery

2005 Getting Lost: Journeys through another city LADA - DIY

2004 Producer Trans Mittere - Forster and Heighes

2000 The Value of Salt - Commissioned by Professor Joe Kelleher, Roehampton Institute

1999 - Producer Curriculum - Forster and Heighes - Roehampton Institute

1999 The Car produced at The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond