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.
2025
Awards for Artists - Paul Hamlyn Foundation (UK)
Artist Award recipient - Henry Moore Foundation (UK)
Never Sleep - Four Corners/Chisenhale Gallery (London, UK)
2024
Rabbits Road Press/UCL Residency (London, UK)
Never Sleep - Chisenhale Gallery Project Space (London, UK)
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)
2020-23
I conceived and set up AiR Drop during the COVID pandemic. The idea was to materially support moving image artists who didn’t have access to high end facilities, to make new work at a difficult time. The name refers to an Artist in Residence opportunity, but one that comes to you. Every month we shipped two enormous crates of film equipment to an emerging artist, who would have the equipment for a fortnight to make work or experiment as they saw fit.
The idea came from my own early career experience of not being able to access equipment because of cost, and having no access to institutional facilities. I designed a package, based largely on my own equipment, that would provide everything necesssary to make work and which was customisable by each artist before it was shipped to them. I raised the funding to cover insurance, shipping and any other unforeseen cost, so that it was completely free.
The project supported ten artists who made new work that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to make. The absolute best part of the project was getting to know the selected artists and their work. Everyone picked up the project and ran with it - some made work that was selected for high-profile festivals, others made proof-of-concept films that they successfully used to win big Arts Council grants (this happened twice) and others just experimented, at a time that was extremely challenging for any artist.
I co-curated AiR Drop with wonderful collaborator Dhelia Snoussi.
2020-21
I conceived and set up skip/intro during the COVID pandemic. The idea was to support emerging artists at a time when most sources of funding disappeared overnight, access to the tools to make moving image work vanished, and there was a real risk artists who had been structurally under-supported by institutions already might be forced to leave promising careers altogether.
The project was a commissioning programme, with three selected artists receiving an artist fee, production budget, technical and curatorial support, and another ten artists receiving technical and curatorial support to make ambitious new moving image work.
The final three films were exhibited at Gasworks during 2020.
I co-curated skip/intro with Elizabeth Benjamin and Dhelia Snoussi.
3m x 50m - paint, cut vinyl, print, archive photography
2020
Co-curated with Liz Hingley.
Large-scale indoor installation made from paint, overpaid cut vinyl, framed and unframed archive photography, large-scale photographic prints, and archive moving image, orbiting a multi-screen installation by Mumbai-based artist collective CAMP, and with an accompanying publication (70pp, edition of 1000).
A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES
On roads in South Asia
17 January – 21 March 2020
Brunei Gallery, SOAS University of London
The exhibition takes us on new and recently rebuilt roads across South Asian regions of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and India. It travels through the early twentieth century to the central-Indian "Nagpur Road Plan" of 1943 before heading to the hope, promise, acceleration and hubris of later decades. It takes now-impossible journeys across nation-states, on roads after and before conflicts, and onto coralline oceanic edges.
A PASSAGE THROUGH PASSAGES’ is part of Roads and the Politics of Thought, a European Research Council funded, 5-year ethnographic study of road-building in South Asia led by Edward Simpson (SOAS) supporting an inter-disciplinary team of researchers, curators and administrators from five countries. www.roadsproject.net
A programme of talks, discussions and other events accompanied the exhibition.
Project leader: Professor Edward Simpson
Institution: School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, UK
Funded by: European Research Council
Volunteer-run cinema project showing monthly documentary screenings with Q&As
2017-18
In 2017 I was invited by film maker Daniel Frampton to help set up the Thinking Cinema, a temporary micro-cinema space in Ladywell, Lewisham. The cinema ran for a year and a half, showing monthly documentary screenings with director Q&As after each. The cinema was located in a forward-thinking project funded by Lewisham Council: a multi-storey building where all upper floors provided accommodation for families who were homeless or were at risk of homelessness. The ground floor comprised the cinema and a cafe/workspace.
Funded by: Lewisham Council
Series of public events exploring the River Thames and its tributaries as a site for reflecting on the future
2016
As part of my Reflection commissioned work, I curated a series of workshops, talks, screenings and public events. The broad aim was to use the River Thames as a springboard for thought and discussion about the nature of London as a city - what forces have shaped it? - and to consider how we might like it to be in the future. The events were as follows:
- Guided wading tour of Deptford Creek/River Ravensbourne (tidal Thames tributary) with a botanist
- Illustration workshop, drawing on natural and human material collected during the tour
- River Thames boat trip and workshop/discussion
- Screening of curated videos from the newly-digitised London Community Video Archive, focussing on the social history of south east London and the river
- Open call/competition - wider public invited to submit foodstuffs found in shops, with details of where in the world the food came from
The public events programme ran over a two month period, was always free to attend and attracted a people covering a broad social spectrum.
In partnership with: Creekside Centre, Deptford Cinema, Entelechy Arts, London Community Video Archive, The Groundnut
Volunteer-run 40-seat arthouse cinema in south east London
2014-20
During my work with the Star and Shadow Cinema and as part of the Kino Climates network, it had often been commented that there was no cinema in London which operated along the framework we had been collectively developing, despite London’s status as a European cultural hub. I moved to London with (amongst other things) the express aim of starting a cinema that would provide this and be a contribution to the capital’s film ecology.
In late 2013 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 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 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 by the group.
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 (though very DIY) cinema with constantly improving facilities.
We also developed ways to run the organisation together. The weekly meetings were, and still are, 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 the cinema in 2020 when the COVID pandemic made its collective in-person experiences impossible.
Programme of feature films and discussions exploring the experience of migrants to London
2015
As part of my Digital Artist Residency to mark the centenary of Ben Uri Gallery, I curated a series of films about the experience of recent migrants to London.
The series comprised eight feature films, ranging from widely-seen works to independent and artists features. Each film tells the story of a character moving to London or its surrounds from a different part of the world. After each screening I facilitated a discussion, covering the way the migrant experience was represented in that particular film, and the experience of migration in London amongst the audience.
The programme involved four London venues (Deptford Cinema, Oxford House, SHAK and The Link Thamesmead). Arriving at the height of the so-called migrant crisis, it felt important to draw together sensitive portrayals of migrants' experiences of the city. The programme won widespread praise, with generally sold-out audiences, and individual screenings appearing in Time Out's '5 best things to see this week'. It was a real privilege to take part in the post-film discussions, which were enlightening.
Partners: Ben Uri Gallery, Somerset House, Deptford Cinema, SHAK, Oxford House, The Link Thamesmead
Feature film programme exploring global youth perspectives, including three UK premieres
2014
In 2014 I had recently founded Deptford Cinema, and we were invited by Film London to programme a series of films for under-25s as part of their city-wide programme. I suggested we curate a series of films exploring what it meant to be a young person from different parts of the world, and invited fellow volunteers to form a collaborative programming group to select the films together. The majority of this group had no previous programming experience, whilst one or two were seasoned film programmers. The environment was collaborative and supportive, with decisions being made together by a group of different ages, nationalities and socio-economic backgrounds. We programmed ten feature films, three of which were UK premieres, and held a series of sold-out screenings.
Supporters: Film London, Film Hub London, BFI, Picturehouse