MY PRACTICE
I have always been drawn to the spaces between things; between places, people and ideas. My interest lies with liminality as method and as form. The throughline in my practice is transformation as a moving between states. 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. I return to threshold states, 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.
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, and by thinkers and makers like Alan Read, Jane Rendell, Tim Etchells, Dee Heddon, and Forster and Heighes.
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.
Alongside that formal work, 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. Interviewing audiences and artists about how work was made, during my PhD research, 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
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.
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, at the threshold of day and night.
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.
2022
Re-link - Sound Table event with Cornelia Parker, Graeme Miller, Sarah Wishart and inhabitants of ACME housing
Spring/Summer 2019
perform/subvert/transform
Sluice Magazine
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" Friday Salon: 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.
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.