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 a trust in elements outside of oneself, this kind of vulnerability is generative and fruitful, 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, live art offers educational spaces an alternative to positivist, capitalist, closure driven, outcome-driven models of knowledge transfer. Rather than moving efficiently toward conclusion, it creates the conditions for 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
The piece visits my mother's birth of me, the messy floundering of a body coming into the world. She describes meeting me for the first time; the story resonated with Julia Kristeva notion of the abject, but instead of seeing it as a threat to order, “the friend that stabs you in the back,” as Julia Kristeva puts it, I see the destabilisations of borders and boundaries as a positive in unsettling whiteness.
I see abjection here as a decolonising force of nature: 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 sustain it.
This disturbance extends into the sonic dimension of the work. Sound spills, breathes, and leaks beyond containment. Two adjacent speakers construct a contextual space in which the room itself — along with all bodies that accompany it — determines the work’s ultimate sound. Audio is therefore not fixed, but relational: shaped by proximity, movement, interference, and resonance.
Split Milk (2025) - Live intervention: University of Gloucestershire, UK
Rick Wood had just delivered a presentation on Western horror films, specifically discussing how young white women are depicted as vessels for patriarchal beliefs, the coming-of-age narrative, and how these young girls are so often the ones possessed—a commentary on what happens when a woman steps outside orthodox conservatism and the perceived risks of sexual liberation.
I sat there thinking: the horror is not in the “possessed” woman, but in the oppressive Christianity and patriarchy exposed—and quite possibly perpetuated—by these films. I wondered whether this commentary was visible to audiences—in Rick’s case, yes—but also whether these films themselves perpetuate male violence against women, particularly through the suppression of autonomy, the condemnation of sexuality, and the silencing of voice. (I do recommend Rick Wood's books 'Woman Scorned' and 'Blissful Explosion' he subverts the usual female archetype that is usually depicted as unstable for trusting their intuition, in these books we see a radical feminist authorship and reclamation of autonomy).
I thought, wow. I looked at my partner, and we witnessed each other in that glance. I thought jokingly, well, they’ll be seeing some form of exorcism in a minute. Maybe a reverse exorcism of some kind.
Multiple screens came on at once, each displaying a man’s staring face. The screens occupied the walls, mirroring one another—seven in total, including the main screen. There was no escape for the viewer; they were met entirely by his gaze. The audience was confronted with the image of a man holding a scroll, his historical pose indicating rationalism, intellect, and rigour: all foundations of “higher education” and the arts, particularly as it was a classical painting by Joshua Reynolds. Even if, at first glance, the identity of the man was not known, the pose and technique were immediately legible.
I started painting my face white, took my suit jacket off, and poured domestic white paint into a Perspex bowl. I covered my face, walked around the room, and slapped a hairy leg onto the table of a person whom I had observed drifting on and off his phone during the presentations. I slapped the paint onto my body, poured it across the table, and rolled around in it. I lifted the table up and held the bowl above my head. The atmosphere tightened; a pin could drop. I covered the entirety of my body and then unclasped my bra from the back, allowing it to fall, revealing bare beige breasts.
This live-action-based contribution explored relational knowledge-making through volatile materials and embodied movement. The work intervened in institutional whiteness by refusing positivist, object-based modes of research, foregrounding instead the idiosyncrasy and unpredictability of live gesture.
Absent without Absence (March, 2024) – Live Intervention: Creative Arts Conference, Gloucestershire, UK
Working with the past as material: I was told that, because of my class, I would not like olives. I fucking love olives. In this piece, I pair a prerecorded video of myself articulating my methodology—retaining the stutters and repetitions within the edit—with the live act of serving olives until people tell me, no. I do not see dyslexia as something that must be polished or corrected; rather, I believe there is a colonial ableism within education that seeks to wipe clean difference in the name of fluency and order, not acknowledging that these differences work as affective charge and other ways of articulating and being, beyond the narrow imagination of Education. In this piece, those disruptions become part of its ecology.
For me, olives carry a kind of capital-T “Taste,” a marker of cultural capital and social grading. Audience members were offered olives throughout the screening of my video, oscillating between listening and consumption, theory and ingestion. Yet the olives arrived in abundance, and through that excess their capital was ruptured.
There was no one whom I denied on the basis of assumption or glance; instead, people spoke for themselves. In that exchange, choice was returned to the audience, allowing desire, distaste, and hesitation to be self-articulated rather than socially assigned.
For me, the piece was also reparative for my younger self—the one judged at social events on the basis of my accent, my classed performance, my perceived unfamiliarity with the codes of taste. In sharing olives, I enacted a moment of love and acceptance: an offering rather than an examination, a gesture that replaced judgement with hospitality.
The title, Absent without Absence, emerges from my discussion of Joshua Reynolds’ The Roffey Family. In the performance, I describe the painting from memory, gesturing toward a work that is not physically present while reconstructing its visual logic in real time. This act of recalling an absent image prompted the audience to become researchers themselves, looking up the painting on their phones and at home to verify the extreme pallor of the figures. Several described them as vampiric. Collectors often claim that time has “bleached” Reynolds’ surfaces, but what is rarely acknowledged is the underlying technique — a deliberate omission of two colour theories.
By pairing dysfluent speech with excessive offering, and a remembered painting with its digital rediscovery, the work asks who is authorised to define taste, fluency, and whiteness — and who is positioned, quietly or explicitly, as outside their terms.