Participatory Work
Having worked as a lecturer in Art and Design, I now uses my teaching experience to extend my practice by working with the public and community groups.
I believes that art plays a vital role in people’s lives and that everyone should have the opportunity for creative expression.
I am interested in developing large scale interactive artworks that offer audiences a form of escapism or allow them agency over the work in some way.
Gather
Gather is collective work that started when visitors to the Rotherham Show made small drawings in response to natural objects collected in the park. Collectively, they became something much bigger.
The project evolved and a large inflatable sculpture featuring all of the artwork was developed and displayed at Rotherham Roots festival in front of th Rotherham Minster.
A community printing workshop accompanied the work, with visitors encouraged to contribute to a printed textile banner, which formed part of the parade procession.
PlayStackBuildShow
PlayStackBuildShow is a title and an instruction. These playful blocks were situated in Victoria Leeds shopping centre. Designed to be an unexpected invitation to pause and play.
The importance of play in our lives is often overlooked, we forget what play can do for us. The puzzle blocks are a physical invitation to re-arrange, deconstruct and create. The audience are an active participant in both the creation and interpretation of the work. My intention with this work is to provide escapism through shared imaginary narratives around the characters.
Morris & Co. Inspired Collaborative Wallpaper
In this family workshop visitors to York Art Gallery were invited to create a design in response to the exhibition, The Art of Wallpaper: Morris & Co.
Individual printed designs were scanned, coloured digitally and then laid out in a pattern inspired by the designs of Morris & Co. The final roll of wall paper was hung in the gallery with the original wallpapers that inspired its creation.
The Reality of Potential Myriad Worlds
This installation piece blends ideas of wonder at nature and the landscape with notions of perceived realities. The overlapping and layered images represent different ways of understanding the world or what is experienced. The images used in this work are old etchings which are now ‘public domain’ imagery. The availabiltiy of these images and their potential use, raises so many questions for me; aside from the obvious authorial displacement, more human concerns on rememberance, memory, and re-written narratives surface. The installation aims to bring all of my competing thoughts together in a deliberate ‘car crash’ of intersecting cultures that morph into more comforting biophilic forms.
