I am a digital media artist, predominately producing creative work for museums and art galleries. My practice has a background in film and photography but more recently this has branched into different digital forms including interactive and web-based works. Originally from Berkshire, my passion for film developed from an interest in photography; I made my first short films whilst studying Film Studies at college. I settled in Coventry after graduating from Coventry University with a first class honours degree in Communication, Culture and Media. In 2003 I won the non-fiction category of the Screen West Midlands sponsored Blink Film Festival for am5; a five-minute essay film ‘taking a stark, monochrome look at the life of a city at 5am’ (Ideas Factory WM). Later that year I travelled to Egypt to shoot We Flew: Lardies Ride the Nile, a 30-minute documentary, broadcast on regional television and Highly Commended at the First Spark Film Festival in 2004.
More recently a large proportion of my work has been based outside of the traditional single-screen formats, particularly working with Museums and Art Galleries. I collaborated with Jo Roberts to create video elements for Finding a Way Through, an exhibition commissioned by the Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum, the same venue that exhibited Mercurial Dance’s 100 Faces in 2006 for which I was also lead filmmaker. Other productions have included Decsurveillance (2005), a 12 screen video / dance installation produced in collaboration with Caroline Bridges as part of the Arts Council’s Capture WM programme; Reflections (2004) and Little Glimpses (2005) for the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum and various site-specific work with Coventry’s Talking Birds including Solid Blue (2002) and Closed Circuit for the Virtual Fringe (2003).
My most recent project is Building Sights (www.buildingsights.org) an online digital media and heritage project devised and developed in collaboration with playwright Vanessa Oakes. Supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund Young Roots programme the project aims to help young people to learn the reason buildings exist, to find out what stories are connected to buildings and to record other people’s memories and opinions. This project represents the latest stage in mine and Vanessa’s collaboration that began in 2007 with Live Like Us for the Belgrade Theatre. We later worked to together to produce the video installation An Act of Life (2008) for Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery which focused on young people’s roles as living memorials to war dead.
I have been working in community and educational settings for nearly ten years. I completed my ITT at the University of Warwick in 2008 with a specialism in Post-Compulsory Education and Training. I have lectured part-time in media theory and practice since 2003 at FE and HE levels. In addition to this I have led a broad variety of participatory work, including Outsider (2005), a 5-minute film funded by the UK Film Council’s First Light scheme; Greenham Common (2004) a film produced with children from St Nicolas Junior School in Newbury that won Runners Up in the Young People’s Trust for the Environment’s LivingLand awards for schools. Installation BeRibboned (2007) for the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum was short listed for the Educational Initiative Award at the MLA Museum & Heritage Awards for Excellence and centred on the city’s ribbon-making industrial heritage. I have worked in dozens of schools, educational institutions and community venues across the country as a creative practitioner and digital media specialist, exploring how educators can make better use of digital media. Creative Partnerships collaborative projects of note include Reflections on Faith (2009) with glass artist Susan Purser Hope and Small Heath School exploring young people’s understanding of the glassmaking heritage of the Midlands and Geo-ing Global with Erdington Hall Primary school, a 1-year whole-school approach project working with GPS technology to explore young people’s relationship with their local environment.
This ongoing body of work with museums and art galleries has developed from an interest in people and their stories. I am fascinated by social history and psychogeography and love getting immersed in the research process; I am inspired by the changing identity of people and places.
