Diving into water without knowing its depth, temperature, or current requires a relinquishing of control; the body must trust what it cannot yet measure. Surrendering requires trust in elements outside oneself; this kind of vulnerability is generative, fruitful, and community-driven. This is how I enter my work, and how I enter educational spaces such as conferences: with an understanding that over-determination can close down the very encounter I hope to create.
To let go is not to abandon responsibility, but to make room. It allows agency to disperse across the room, repositioning the audience not as passive recipients but as active constituents of the unfolding event. Meaning is not delivered intact from one body to another; it is negotiated live through presence, attention, discomfort, and response.
In this sense, dancing-with as a form of live art offers educational spaces an alternative to fixed, positivist, capitalist, closure-driven models of knowledge transfer or “dissemination.” My model instead encourages fluid co-production in real time. I say “my model” loosely, because this diminishing of hierarchy has occurred throughout history: it happens when we become receptive to difference rather than attempting to eliminate it and or subsume it into sameness; it happens when ego is relinquished, or at least temporarily set aside.
To produce knowledge together, rather than to disseminate it as though there is a fixed “knower” and “receiver,” “expert” and “amateur,” “creator” and “consumer,” is to unsettle these capitalist and Cartesian binaries. Dancing-with proposes an alternative to hierarchical structures of learning. Rather than moving efficiently toward conclusion, it creates the conditions for a shared wilderness: a space of uncertainty, real-time relation, and mutual becoming, where each participant arrives at their own point of opening.
Alternative Abject: I am in love (May, 2026) - Live art and dual sound intervention: University of Gloucestershire, UK
Creative Environments: Stories, Ethics, and Practice
The piece returns to my mother’s birth of me: the messy floundering of a body coming into the world. She describes meeting me for the first time, and her account resonated with Julia Kristeva notion of the abject. Yet rather than understanding abjection as a threat to order, “the friend that stabs you in the back,” as Kristeva puts it. I understand these destabilisations of borders and boundaries as productive, a means of unsettling whiteness and the systems that sustain it.
I approach abjection here as a decolonising force: something that disrupts semiotics and visual language, exposing that which exceeds representation and escapes the limits of speech. In doing so, it begins to dismantle the fallacies of tradition and the proprietary structures that uphold it.
The work invites the audience to become active participants within the piece itself. Breathing heavily, lightly, deeply, meditatively, each sound distinct, participants collectively generate a temporary shared environment. Meaning emerges relationally through the coexistence of bodies, rhythms, and responses.
This disturbance extends into the sonic dimension of the work. Sound spills, breathes, and leaks beyond containment. Two adjacent speakers construct a contextual field in which the room itself, together with all bodies occupying it, determines the work’s ultimate sound. Audio is therefore not fixed but relational, shaped by proximity, movement, interference, and resonance.
“Dancing-with” names(?) this relational methodology. It is not about control or performance imposed onto the world, but about moving with materials, memories, environments, and other bodies rather than dominating them. The work explores collaboration, responsiveness, and coexistence, treating movement as an ongoing dialogue between self, place, history, and matter. In this sense, “dancing-with” becomes an iterative practice of relation: a way of remaining open to disturbance, exchange, and mutual transformation.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20378534
Split Milk (2025) - Live intervention: University of Gloucestershire, UK
Academia and the Arts: Partnership and Collaboration
In stepping back from Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari 1980), I often find myself returning to a recurring question: who spoke before, but was not heard?, and I undertake a deep dive into that question. This question is grounded in repeated experiences in which I have spoken or conceptualised an idea, only for it to go unacknowledged, and later hear a similar point re-articulated by someone whose voice is more readily legitimised and affirmed within academic and cultural spaces. Usually by a white middle-class man, but it isn't always gender specific.
I am working from within the conditions of Western institutional knowledge production, and am therefore attentive to how my own position shapes what can be seen, cited, 'amended' and recognised as theory. In this context, I turned toward Indigenous, African diasporic, and other non-Western traditions, as epistemic formations that have been historically ignored within Western philosophical recognition. These engagements do not seek to collapse difference or produce a smooth equivalence between traditions, but to foreground the uneven conditions through which certain epistemologies are legitimised as philosophy while others are rendered peripheral and/or systematically ignored. Power determines who is cited, who is heard, and whose ideas are allowed to enter the archive.
These traditions have long conceptualised knowledge as relational, distributed, and non-hierarchical, challenging the phallocentric formations that structure Western theory.
These questions of who is seen, and how authority becomes legible, were then taken into the installation space through a series of screens and embodied intervention...
Absent without Absence (March, 2024) – Live Intervention: Creative Arts Conference, Gloucestershire, UK
This multi-media presentation examines Absent without Absence, a live and video‑based performance that mobilises classed memory, dysfluency, and embodied offering as a research method. Working from a childhood assertion that, "because of my class, I would not like olives," the piece reclaims this moment of social sorting as material. A prerecorded video articulating my methodology—retaining stutters, repetitions, and dysfluent speech—is paired with the live act of serving olives until the audience refuses. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic structure, the work proposes a post‑Deleuzian research model that resists colonial logics of knowledge production.
Rather than privileging standardisation, or movement toward a singular centre, the project values multiplicity, divergence, human differences, and embodied forms of knowing. In doing so, it challenges Eurocentric tendencies to marginalise forms of difference deemed peripheral or of lesser value. Instead, it embraces multimodal, whole‑body inquiry as a form of resistance, treating excess, dysfluency, and lateral connection as generative forces.
As a dyslexic artist this work helps me embrace my differences rather than see them as errors to correct. I believe these differences offer affective charge beyond the current limitations of western education.
For more details: Absent without Absence