Hello,
I am an interdisciplinary artist making work in relation to land and its life-giving, material-spiritual capacity.
Centering embodied knowledge and ceremony, my work seeks to attend the impact of colonial capitalism's enclosures of land, bodies and practices, asking how land-emergent knowledges give rise to transformative justice and abolitionist futures.
I weave together textiles, vocal work, installation and performance, as well as ancestral constellations and guiding groups and individuals out on the land in ceremony. I teach and share this land-based approach to creative work, ancestral healing and environmental justice in higher education and community contexts.
My threads to this work have been many and all processes begin with those who came before; if you’re interested to hear more, read on….
❤️
I am obligated to the life-giving force of rivers, the queer ancestors and land ancestors who make my being possible.
In 2009, whilst studying literature as an undergrad, I pursued an independent study of Native American literature (1960s onwards). This deepened my understanding of ongoing settler-colonialism and oriented a reverence for Indigenous life-ways specifically towards relations between oral traditions, ceremony and land. It further consolidated an understanding of why #landback is foundational to any ecological, decolonial and collective repair process. I am ever indebted to the life changing words and worlds of Leslie M Silko, N Scott Momaday, Linda Hogan, Joy Harjo, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Simon Ortiz, James Welch, Jeanette Armstrong, Louise Erdrich and more.
I began exploring my own relation to my ancestral lands, ecologies and mythologies. From 2011 - 2014 I worked as an independent storyteller and with the Crick Crack Club, delving into memories held in land, bodies and story itself as a living, breathing, animate being to track and listen for. I completed an MA in creative writing, culminating in a performance piece weaving personal and archetypal mythologies through site-specific research.
Pursuing my passion in embodied ways of knowing, somatic healing and performance, I found my way into dance, improvisation and performance. I was lucky to work with teachers and artists such as Stephanie Maher, Keith Hennessey, Maria Scarroni, Kathleen Hermsdorf, Julyen Hamilton, Billie Hanne, Frank Van der Ven, Margaret Pikes, Stephanie Skura…
In 2014 I began a PhD to contribute a land listening practice to the steadily growing field of art and ecology. Supported by an AHRC grant, in 2015 I encountered a river in the North of England on an artistic research trip. I returned to this river over the next five years, listening for its stories. It took me on an embodied, somatic journey unearthing the history of the European witch-hunts and their intersection with transAtlantic slavery and Indigenous genocide in ongoing settler-colonial contexts. I asked how the body can be witness both to historical trauma and simultaneously the imagination of an otherwise that is being propelled by river, stone, land. I focussed on the life force of rivers as an intelligence that propels all systemic and ancestral healing.
I developed my own practice of constellations emerging from the land and more-than-human collaborators in this time, called “the unearthings”. I received my PhD in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University in 2020.
Since my doctorate, my work has evolved to include painting, textile, natural dyeing and rites of passage work. I am also a Family Constellations practitioner and Yoga teacher. I give workshops/lectures in art institutions, universities and community spaces. I offer a land-based pedagogical approach integrating decolonial discourse, embodied listening to more-than-human presences and creative practice.
I love to be in collaboration, and am member of Decolonising Botany, working group initiated by Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe and launched at Liverpool Bienniale 2021, LARK: Living Archive of Re-membered Knowledges with Shelley Etkin, and trans-disciplinary collective Hungry Mothers, instigated by artist Tyler Rai. These groups explore, in different ways, decolonial approaches to ecology, land, knowledge sharing and solidarity.