About
November 2022
I am an artist based in Glasgow working with moving image to explore subjectivity and emotion as vessels for challenging dominant social and cultural norms. I employ conceptual frameworks stemming from feminism within my practice, including: autotheory, the combining and co-mingling of theory and philosophy with autobiography; feminist geopolitics, the embodied of politics within everyday lives; and emotional geography, understanding of emotion in terms of social and spatial articulation. I am invested in the communal ways moving image comes into fruition, and my role as an artist intersects with and is informed by roles I undertake in collaboration with others, including as a researcher, producer and access consultant.
My work leans into subjectivity, embracing contradiction and nuance as a means to unsettle dominant objective discourse. To achieve this, I collage new and borrowed visual materials to tell stories where emotional and embodied ways of knowing are prioritised. I am invested in horizontal hierarchies of knowledge, and this weaving of information is further explored in my use of voice overs, performed by myself and others, which are created from interviews and co-authorship, and deliberately merge ‘low’ and ‘high brow’ cultural references.
My previous work has explored how medicine and science is informed by, and informs, cultural norms, behaviours and assumptions about bodies deemed ‘out of place’. ‘Body of Water’ (2018) focused on the misrepresentations and lack of acknowledgement of a patient's pain and the accompanying violations of bodily integrity and self-determination by medical professionals, social norms and cultural representations. Turning the lens upon myself, I explored reclaiming bodily autonomy through swimming and the cultural therapeutic associations with water. ‘Tell me, how do I feel?’ (2020-21) harnessed the representation of the ‘misbehaving body’ as an unreliable narrator. The work centres on interviews with femme presenting people who have experienced medical trauma, bringing their stories into direct dialogue with the dominance of objectivity in medical discourse and diagnostic narratives. Taking New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ (1983) and my own and other’s stories as its central driving beat, the work uses abstract imagery shot down telescopes and microscopes, hospital curtains, material drawn from the Wellcome Collective archive, and episodes of medical television drama ‘Grey’s Anatomy’.
I am currently making a new moving image work titled ‘Haunting’, which asks how identity is formed by place and family or origin. Creative in collaboration with a queer team, ‘Haunting’ uses gothic novel ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1847) by Emily Brontë as a vessel to explore themes of addiction, dysfunctional ways of loving, and intergenerational trauma. Filmed at the supposed location of ‘Wuthering Heights’, Top Withens above Haworth in Yorkshire, ‘Haunting’ will be shot on 16mm and edited digitally to create a rhythmic visual landscape that captures the depth of colour and texture of this visceral and often inhospitable moorland. The footage will be accompanied by a voiceover drawing on motifs of haunting and themes of subversive gender roles, addiction and dysfunctional relationships found in ‘Wuthering Heights’, held by a evocative and propelling soundscape to create tensions, release and catharsis.
Accessibility runs as a core throughout my practice, and I integrate access measures into my work including creative captioning and queer audio description. I am indebted to fellow disabled artists and access workers who have taught me much about this area of creative practice, including Collective Text and Quiplash.