culture with purpose
Throughout my career I have always put public experience and education at the forefront of my work.
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Making art that involves other people, and helping them to understand complex historical material, is central to the programmes I lead.
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I use public realm commissions as a way to experiment with different materials and methods: from batik to digital and theatre to kinetic art, I have used a diverse set of resources to create unique and interesting projects that involve community experience​​.
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The services I can offer include project management, consultancy, workshop design, community development, final piece fabrication and more.
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Below is a summary of some of my most recent projects. To find out more about my services and CV, send me an email.
ongoing collaborations with green shoes arts
2018-PRESENT
Over several years I have produced public realm art with Green Shoes Arts, a mental health focused charity in Dagenham.
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The work I have produced has been collaborations with groups of people in the area: generally, I will run sessions with different groups, in which they produce art, before I create a collage of the works, and make a unique piece of public art from them.
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This process has been repeated with the Sycamore Trust, Ab Phab Youth Group, Richard Alibon School, Valence Primary School, LBBD Young Carers and others
who where when why how wat tyler
collaboration with unpuzzled theatre
BASILDON HAF PROGRAMME | SUMMER 2024 | ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND
In collaboration with Unpuzzled Theatre CIC, I wrote a successful funding bid which allowed us to work with 200 young people across 2 weeks in summer. We taught the history of the Peasants Revolt and its South Essex origins through visual art and theatre, culminating with the children performing in a 20 minute play.
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This project is due to continue in various iterations across South Essex across 2025.
Barking and dagenham: idols
Commission piece and creative workshops
EASTBURY MANOR HOUSE | LBBD COUNCIL | 2024
Acclaimed poet Dauda Ladejobi and I created a museum-style exhibition of work for Eastbury Manor House, portraying stories from the history of Barking and Dagenham, as well as the experiences of local residents, in new contexts. We took stories from the area's long history and imagined what would happen if those stories had happened in different times: for example, a newspaper article about the Viking raids of the 9th century; a clickbait article detailing the best way to make sacrifices; a Roman scout report detailing the landscape and cultural nuances of the area.
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This culminated in an exhibition of "artefacts" alongside a new tapestry-style large artwork for the house, which will hang permanently.
a knight at the museum
collaboration with unpuzzled theatre
SOUTHEND CENTRAL MUSEUM | AUGUST 2023 | ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND
In collaboration with Unpuzzled Theatre CIC, I wrote a successful funding bid which allowed us to create a 30-minute long play about Southend's Prittlewell Prince - the Anglo-Saxon royal buried in Southend with early Christian artefacts in his grave - and shared this story with over 400 local residents across 5 days in August 2023. This play was accompanied by a 30-minute interactive visual arts session looking at Anglo-Saxon history.
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You can see a full recorded version of the play here.
purta fleot
researching the ancent history of purfleet-on-thames
HIGH HOUSE | JAN-JUNE 2023 | CREATIVE ESTUARY & THURROCK COUNCIL
Working with Purfleet Primary Academy, High House Community Group, Purfleet Youth Club and the Purfleet-on-Thames Community Hub, I researched, taught and made art about the area's ancient origins. This included finding out about the Purfleet Interglacial Period - a period of archaeo-geological time named after the area - through to archaeologists finding a mammoth and an elephant buried on top of each other, separated by around 50,000 years. ​
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From this research and the designs of the groups I work with, I painted three, 4-metre long silk flags alongside Sarah Doyle of Kinetika.
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These were exhibited at Colourscape in July 2023, and are now permanently housed at Purfleet Military and Heritage Centre and Purfleet Primary Academy.
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Alongside Kent University academic and writer Jeremy Scott, I look at the origins - mostly Anglo-Saxon - of place names in and around Southend-on-Sea. Alongside broad research into the history of migration movements into the British Isles, I used these Anglo-Saxon place names as an entry point into a public discussion around perceptions of what it means to be British and English, as well as opinions on migration.
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To facilitate this conversation, I made some graphic artworks which were presented on large aluminium boards as well as postcards, depicting places around Southend as they might have been 1000-2000 years ago, with their name written in Old English (and in one case Norse) in Runes, in an homage to seaside town postcards. Jeremy took the research I did alongside research into local folk tales and turned these into new poems, fictions and prose, telling new stories about settlers, explorers, invaders and migrants to the area, as well as personal memories, about Southend.
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We presented this work alongside a questionnaire which included a quiz about British history and qualitative questions about perceptions around Britishness, to the public of Southend in September 2022. Over 100 people answered our questionnaire and we found that there was a low level of knowledge amongst the general public about ancient historical migrations into Britain from other parts of the world, as well as about the gerneral timeline of events on this island before 1066.
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More about this project can be found here.
migration, place names and identity
researching the origins of place names in southend alongside british values
SOUTHEND-ON-SEA / MARCH-SEPTEMBER 2022 | CREATIVE ESTUARY
These projects are the latest in eight years of community arts and heritage project work that has included working with, among others, Studio 3 Arts, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Metal Culture, Southend Museums, Havering Mind, Barking and Dagenham Young Carers, Kent University, Thurrock Art Trail, and Creative Blast.
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If you've got a project and want to enquire about my services and skills, get in touch.
