A delicate dance as fluid as water...
Can research be free‑flowing, unbound by documentation? Can it be an entity that lives and transforms within the encounterer? Is a person not already a bundle of knowledge? (PhD question, Starkey, 2023)
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 fruitful and community-driven. It unfolds live, and because it is unrehearsed, it redistributes power; the audience becomes active, as I am not simply delivering something to them; the event is changeable; in fact, the outcome usually changes, and I welcome that . The vulnerability is a strength, an opening/invitation, making the process a less hierarchical way of being/relating in the world. Vulnerability, in fact, makes the work more engaging. This is how I enter my work and 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, rather than locating it in a single authorial figure, 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's messy in the best way, there is no "clean", colonial transmission, dancing-with ( Starkey, 2023-2026) rethinks, re-practices knowledge as a catalyst rather than an object and it is negotiated - a space between- live through presence, attention, discomfort, and response.
In this sense, through practices of with-ness, live art offers educational spaces an alternative to fixed, positivist, capitalist, and closure-driven models of knowledge transfer or "dissemination." To produce knowledge, rather than to 'consume' as though there is a fixed “knower” and “receiver,” “expert” and “amateur,” “creator” and “consumer,” "teacher" and "learner" as if one party is the "passive absorber", my mode of relation 'dancing-with' unsettles these capitalist and Cartesian binaries. My practice develops decolonial, multimodal approaches that nurture difference . Instead of the capitalist notion of moving efficiently toward conclusion, it creates the conditions for a shared wilderness: a space of uncertainty, real-time relation, and becoming, where each participant arrives at their own point of opening. In doing so, it challenges the idea of objective truth, proposing truth instead as plural, relational, and always in motion—a process of dancing-with rather than arriving. I don't share work and claim that' it's 'arrived' . As though the person engaging offers nothing. I do the approach; it's a praxis that operates relationally. I don't want separation; that is the whole purpose of my work. Even at the conference, the research unfolds live.
My refusal to recentralise whiteness with photography, which is not a neutral device; if anything, it has, and still does have, a long colonial history. It is a methodological resistance to colonial logics and is purposeful in the project.
I decided not to use images from this point on because they flatten the nuances of the work and pander to colonial tendencies that have seeped into education and even into the PhD format. Documentation does not work with projects such as Rupturing Object White. The moment an image is produced, the work is forced into a frame, made legible through the very structures it seeks to unsettle. Refusing images becomes a methodological choice - an act of resistance against the demand to render the work visible and fixed.
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.
As I sat there in white linen trousers without a period pad, I hoped the blood would begin to seep through the fabric as the birth story spoke itself into existence. I had removed my pad during the conference break, though perhaps I should never have worn one that day. I wanted the smell of menstrual blood to puncture both the whiteness of the space and my white trousers so that, as people breathed, the scent of iron might unsettle the illusion of pristine neutrality, transforming white into a human "error" while releasing menstruation from the social imposition of shame. The blood came. I felt part of my body give way. I felt its warmth and wetness in my knickers, but the internal surfacing wasn't enough to see from a distance, nor smell with poignancy.
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. Agency disperses across the room, allowing knowledge to be understood as plural rather than singular, and unsettling the idea of a single authorial figure. The audience is repositioned not as passive recipients but as active constituents of the unfolding event. Meaning emerges relationally through the coexistence of bodies, rhythms, and responses.
Unlike usual conference presentations, I remained seated as one of the many participants and breathed with people; I did not want to occupy a position of verticality. I allowed the work to unfold in real time. We experienced the piece alongside one another, responding through ethical listening, attentiveness, and shared yet individual presence.
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' is a relational methodology and incorporates smell-with, listening-with, breathe-with, it's a constellation of with-ness. 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, people, 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.
In this piece I have moved away from the Rhizome described by Deleuze and Guattari, understanding that such systems predate the name that these two white French theorists gave it. My research and developing methodology also predate its ‘academic sign‑off’, and by that I mean ‘the link’ that makes work worthy of making it into knowledge systems. This severing/refusal is an attempted 'delinking' of sorts, as discussed by Walter Mignolo.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20378534
School of Arts, Culture and Environment Conference 2026 - Events - University of Gloucestershire
Split Milk (2025) - Live intervention: University of Gloucestershire, UK
Academia and the Arts: Partnership and Collaboration
'The sound of the paint touching the skin is striking and visceral. What I imagine to be a gentle act in reality is not...'
Split Milk is a live art intervention that examines how knowledge is produced, authorised, and unevenly recognised within Western intellectual and institutional contexts. Drawing on Indigenous, African diasporic, and working-class traditions of relational epistemology, the work challenges the uneven distribution of singularity and intellectual authority rather than rejecting individual authorship outright. It interrogates how Eurocentric frameworks privilege the figure of the autonomous “genius,” while rendering other knowledge systems anonymous, or culturally bounded, and often denying recognition of individual intellectual agency outside European and elite class contexts.
The work situates these concerns through Indigenous governance systems, relational epistemologies, and working-class forms of collective learning, demonstrating long-standing alternatives to Eurocentric models of knowledge production. These ideas are explored through performance strategies that critically interrogate institutional authority, Enlightenment rationalism, and the invisibility of whiteness in academic spaces.
Through a live intervention involving Enlightenment portraiture, sound, white domestic paint, and embodied action, Split Milk disrupts the boundaries between subject, viewer, and institution. It foregrounds knowledge as affective, situated, and relational, while examining how institutional whiteness and rationalism shape what is recognised as legitimate knowledge. The work proposes a different model of knowledge: relational, affective, and catalytic. Rather than positioning individual authorship and collective knowledge as opposing modes, Split Milk asks what becomes possible when multiple forces meet - when knowledge is produced through encounter, relation, and embodied exchange. It emphasises that the work is not concerned with choosing either/or, but with attending to the generative, individuated insights that emerge through relational contact.
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, recognised as theory, and ultimately amended. From my experience at the University of Gloucestershire, students carry an ethical obligation to remain vigilant, as supervisors can and do erase difference in alignment with Eurocentric expectations. Even within projects such as my own, where I am attempting to rupture object white, I have been given directives that contradict this objective, such as a 'need' for photographic 'evidence'. Rather than supporting practices of dismantling, institutional preferences have repeatedly redirected the work toward forms that recentre whiteness, requiring written, "absorbing" theatre practices and or high-tech, 5 camera visual outputs (outputs I personally cannot afford) because these are the modes most readily recognised and valued within the academy.
In response to these conditions, I turned toward Indigenous, African diasporic, and working-class knowledges as epistemic formations that have been historically ignored, marginalised, or excluded from Western philosophical recognition. These engagements do not seek to collapse difference or produce a smooth equivalence between traditions. Rather, they foreground the uneven conditions through which certain epistemologies are legitimised as philosophy while others are rendered peripheral, systematically ignored, or appropriated only when they can be absorbed into existing structures of authority. In such cases, knowledge is extracted, repackaged, and recirculated through dominant institutions while the conditions of exclusion remain unchanged, often without citation or meaningful acknowledgement of its origins.
These traditions have long conceptualised knowledge as relational, distributed, situated 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 conference space through a series of screens and embodied intervention...
Absent without Absence (March, 2024) – Live Intervention: Creative Arts Conference, Gloucestershire, UK
Culture and the Civic Agenda
Absent without Absence is a multimedia; live and video-based performance that mobilises classed memory, rupture of representation and the absence of, speech dysfluency, and embodied offering as a research method.
The work germinates from an experience during my BA studies. On my first day at university, after only a brief conversation, a fellow student looked down at me and said, "I believe you're supposed to be down the road at the college." Although we later shared the same friendship group, she never fully accepted me. During one meal together at a restaurant, she offered olives to every person at the table but me, instead remarking that they were "an acquired taste." The exclusion was subtle yet performative: an act of social positioning that elevated her own cultural capital while simultaneously othering me. Such moments of classed microaggression have recurred throughout my life, daily occurrences when I am in white middle-class spaces, the disparity between what I say and what is heard is vast. Assumptions attached to my regional accent and working-class background continue to shape how I am perceived. Within this gesture, I understood there to be an assumption that I would not appreciate olives because of my class. Absent without Absence reclaims this moment of social sorting as artistic material and as a methodology for research and transforms it into a moment of love and acceptance.
The work combines a prerecorded video, in which I articulate my methodology while intentionally retaining stutters, repetitions, and dysfluent speech, with a live performance in which I continually offer olives to audience members until they refuse. The repeated act of offering transforms an everyday social interaction into a performance of memory, class, endurance, and refusal.
Conversing with Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the rhizome, the project proposes a post-Deleuzian model of research that resists colonial logics of knowledge production. Rather than privileging standardisation or movement towards a singular centre, the work values multiplicity, divergence, embodied knowledge, and human difference. It challenges Eurocentric traditions that marginalise ways of knowing considered peripheral, excessive, or deficient. Instead, it positions multimodal, bodily inquiry as a form of resistance, treating dysfluency, excess, and lateral connection as generative rather than something to be corrected.
As a dyslexic artist, this work enables me to embrace my differences rather than understand them as errors requiring correction. I argue that these differences generate an affective and epistemological charge that exceeds the limitations of dominant Western educational models. Absent without Absence ultimately proposes that vulnerability, embodied experience, and neurodivergent modes of communication are not obstacles to research, but vital methodologies through which knowledge can be produced differently.
For more details: Absent without Absence | Zenodo