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. This vulnerability extends to my work, which unfolds live and non-choreographed. 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, 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 - 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." A sensory constellation of with-ness runs throughout my practice: smelling, listening, and tasting extend beyond the visual field through sound, working-class accent, scent, and other embodied modes of perception while interrogating art history through its aliveness. Because the work is unrehearsed and employs unpredictable materials, each encounter unfolds collectively in real time. Rather than presenting knowledge as something already formed and transmitted, the work invites its co-production, disrupting hierarchical distinctions between artist and audience and positioning knowledge as an emergent, relational process. I use the phrase "my model" loosely, however, because diminishing of hierarchy has occurred throughout history whenever we become receptive to difference rather than attempting to eliminate it or subsume it into sameness; whenever the 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,” "teacher" and "learner" as if one party is the "passive absorber", my mode of relation 'dancing-with' unsettles these capitalist and Cartesian binaries. Dancing-with proposes an alternative to hierarchical learning structures. I attempt to create a 'with-ness' no matter what materials are used, a shared, non-hierarchical space in which understanding emerges relationally, through encounter, movement, listening, respect, and mutual responsiveness. My practice develops decolonial, multimodal approaches that nurture difference rather than erase, appropriate, or flatten it into sameness. 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. 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 that's 'arrived' , I don't give talks that discuss my approach. 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, they ain't getting papers.
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. Meaning emerges relationally through the coexistence of bodies, rhythms, and responses. I chose to remain seated among the participants/listeners and breathe with them rather than standing apart; I did not wish to occupy a position of verticality. Instead, we experienced the work 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.
'dance - with' and in names(?) this 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.
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 engage 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 also examining how institutional whiteness and rationalism shape what is recognised as legitimate knowledge. The work ultimately considers how performance can render visible the structures that determine whose knowledge is authorised, individuated, or erased.
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. Rather than supporting practices of dismantling, institutional preferences have repeatedly redirected the work toward forms that recentre whiteness, requiring written and 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.
Drawing on 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, whole-body inquiry as a form of resistance, treating dysfluency, excess, and lateral connection as generative rather than corrective.
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