Margins
Rupturing Object White was made, and continues to be made, in the margins; these are the very conditions through which the work has been shaped, encountered, and understood. The project developed under precarious circumstances, making use of a daylight photography studio at the University of Gloucestershire whenever access was possible. As a PhD student, I was neither guaranteed nor formally provided with dedicated studio space by the university. Following a difficult supervisory relationship that deteriorated significantly, I was subjected to surveillance and subsequently uninvited from exhibiting work at the onsite gallery. Yet I have remained committed to the belief that work can exist within the cracks of the ivory tower: that it can inhabit institutional margins while simultaneously critiquing the structures that produce those margins, and, in doing so, generate innovative forms of existence and resistance.
Alongside this, I have increasingly made work outside of institutional walls, using exterior and non-sanctioned spaces as sites of production, thought, meaning-making and relating otherwise. I would strongly encourage students and artists to recognise this as a viable and necessary strategy when the institution in which they study or work becomes epistemically violent, extractive, or creatively restrictive. To work outside is not simply to relocate practice physically, but to refuse the terms under which knowledge, legitimacy, and artistic value are too often policed within academic structures. In this sense, the outside becomes not a deficit of resources, but a generative condition from which other visual, critical, and political possibilities can emerge.
Outdoor and in-between spaces
Meeting point atemporally from social/outside, personal, cultural and political spheres ...
As interior university working spaces became increasingly difficult to sustain under conditions of restricted autonomy, repeated interruption, and documented institutional friction, exterior locations emerged as necessary continuations of the studio rather than secondary alternatives. For this reason, working outside was never simply an aesthetic preference, but a practical and methodological response to environments in which sustained artistic production had become conditional. When sanctioned spaces become too tightly managed, too visible, or too difficult to occupy, the conscious student or artist must begin to seek other sites where work can continue beyond institutional permissions. Whiteness requires bodies to maintain it, and complicity to preserve its order; for this reason, other spaces become necessary not only to breathe differently, but to encounter forms of kinship, resistance, and like-minded making beyond the regulated frame of the university or gallery.
Removed from the managed visibility of these interiors, outdoor space offered a different register of time, movement, and decision-making—one less governed by surveillance, spatial competition, or imposed constraint. Within these exterior settings, the work developed a heightened responsiveness to weather, ambient sound, passing light, uneven surfaces, people and contingency, allowing material uncertainty to become an active part of the live ecology. The movement outdoors therefore marked both a continuation of practice and a critical shift away from inherited institutional expectations, demonstrating how displaced conditions of making can generate their own visual and political language.
Rabid Heart (Feb - June 2025)
This work was produced through pre-booked, intermittent use of a daylight studio at the University of Gloucestershire, a transient and continually shifting space that rarely remained stable from one booking to the next. Although the space was booked in advance, changes to the studio layout, equipment, and surrounding materials frequently required the work to be reconfigured, and rethought in response to altered conditions. The presence of staff members using the space to install and present their own work further contributed to this instability -- in the single booked space -- producing a layered environment in which multiple practices coexisted within the same spatial and temporal frame, contesting time and decisions. On one occasion, a staff member entered without warning while I was undressed, prompting me to grab my bathrobe and sit down quickly, attempting to shield my body rather than allow myself to be exposed without consent. This incident forced me to develop practical strategies — such as the use of privacy screens — to protect my autonomy within a space that was nominally booked yet never fully secure. On an occasion that spanned a couple of weeks, this booked space was also disrupted by the presence of archived fine art paintings and stored objects, making visible the institution’s uneven distribution of space and priority. Under these precarious conditions, I learned to make quick, unapologetic decisions, and the work evolved through a heightened responsiveness to circumstance, where time and space were deeply interconnected and contingent. Rather than treating these interruptions solely as obstacles, I began incorporating elements of the surrounding archive into the visual field, allowing the work to register not only its formal concerns but also the material pressures of its production. Across four iterations of Rabid Heart, each installation generated a distinct visual and affective outcome, demonstrating how a single work can accrue multiple lives through contingency, adaptation, and institutional friction.
These conditions shaped both the material and methodological development of the work, where installation, interruption, and response became part of the process rather than external factors.
