I am a transdisciplinary artist-academic working across health, ecology and justice. My multimodal creative practice approaches human experience as ecologically entangled, and engages complex, interwoven narratives through the body as a medium and political archive. My practice as research emerged as a situated response to uncertain global conditions in times of polycrisis. The anti-oppressive frameworks I work with are informed by critical mental health, posthumanist, new materialist, ecofeminist scholarship, and histories of collective action in health. I primarily use autoethnographic and embodied methods to unearth solo and collective counterstorytelling that responds to social, ecological and epistemic injustices. Since completing my PhD, I have been laying the groundwork for Becoming Creaturely, an emergent socially engaged project developed in collaborative partnerships with more-than-human species and sites, to investigate how entangled storylines between beings and place, can reveal ambient and anti-oppressive conditions.
I have shared my critical and creative practice nationally and internationally. Some of the organisations and collectives that have sponsored, commissioned, shown and supported my work include: Cath Clover and Wild Pansy Press, Chisenhale Dance Space, Woodland Retreat London and Queens Wood Cafe, Ponderosa, Airspace Gallery, Open House Hackney, Intercultural Roots, Stort Pride, Wilderness, Goldsmiths, University of London (Visual Cultures, Theatre and Performance, and the Graduate School), Counterfield Collective, The Embodied Research Network, the International Federation for Theatre Research, and POWES (Psychology of Women and Equalities).
For an overview of the kinds of workshops I run, and the different applications of my practice in community arts, creative health and environmental humanities please refer to my workshops and praxis pages. If you would like to have a conversation about working together you can send me a message via the contact me page.
About
ecologically entangled embodied storytelling
unearthing situated knowledges
Through practice and research I have created my own eco-embodied approach to unearthing situated knowledges. I take an experimental approach when composing creative material, one that I have developed through transdisciplinary practice as research across mental health, activism, movement, visual arts and academia. The creative material I generate is site-sensitive and shaped by a desire to respond to some of the urgent crises of our times. In my own embodied practice, I cultivate relationality with the more-than-human by meeting companion species as teachers, durational deep listening practices, slow-somatic movement, imagery and encountering the land as partner through the felt-sense and subtle bodily sensations. The prompts and invitations I use to facilitate guided movement are often co-developed in partnerships with creatures, landscapes, elements and animate objects. You may view six imagery-based movement scores with guided audios I composed for the participatory research design of my doctoral research via this link.
My praxis proposes exploratory and playful ways of unearthing ecologically entangled storytelling by approaching the body as a medium and political archive. The poetic scripts and creative prompts I write offer a physical approach to tease articulations of the materially entangled self through myth and imagery interweaving the landscape of the mind, together with tracings of subtle bodily sensations in the form of gestures, mark-making, creative writing and the spoken word. You can view some of the multimodal media outcomes co-produced through this approach via multispecies encounters, land as partner and audio-visual pages.
Critical and anti-oppressive frameworks inform the movement scores holding propositions and invitations for embodied actions as ways to decentre anthropocentric views of the human, undermine hierarchies of being and trouble power relations.
As a result, this polyvocal embodied storytelling practice is a socially engaged, experiential interplay of environments and inner landscapes, cultivating a space for self-reflexivity and collective care.
Background
I completed my PhD with the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2024, which you can read more about here. My fascination with bodymind practices started while I was reading Far Eastern philosophies for my first degree with the University of Malta between 2009 and 2011. During this time, I started practicing meditation within the Advaita Vedanta tradition, and observing the effects these techniques had on my own psyche, led me to complete an M.Sc in Psychology with the University of Essex in 2013. I then moved away from academic research, and plunged myself into the mental health field in London to work in third-sector mental health services across boroughs and diverse client groups taking psychosocial approaches to the experience of crisis. Before migrating into the community arts field, I facilitated bodymind practices in a mental health crisis recovery service in Islington. It is my experience of working with mainstream understandings of mental distress, alongside intensely devoting myself to nurturing and growing my creative practice, that led me to take a transdisciplinary approach to both my practice and research.
I worked for third-sector organisations like Rethink Mental Illness and Look Ahead across services and London boroughs from 2015 until 2020 where I alternated between frontline practitioner and organisational roles. I migrated to the Visual Cultures field to start my Practice as Research PhD in 2019. From 2019 until 2020 I co-ordinated and facilitated mindbody activities at Islington Crisis House, a project ran in partnership with Candi (Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust). Since 2022 I have been working as an Associate Lecturer with the Centre for Academic Language and Literacies (CALL) at Goldsmiths, University of London. I am Module Lead for the Arts & Humanities pathway on the International Foundation Programme and seminar lead for modules including London Arts Capital: Theatre & Fine Art, Contemporary Art Worlds, Critical Thinking, and Researching our Lives and World on the Connected Curriculum programme for undergraduate students across subjects. I also served as a core contributor and external practice-researchers liaison for Counterfield Collective from 2020 until 2023.
You can view my practice as research outputs via Goldsmiths Research Online.