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 assigned 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.
In-between spaces // Creative Conferences
In the cracks of an institution, you sometimes find the people who make it possible to stay — where hope exists beyond narcissism and capitalist permeation. These are the spaces where like-minded bodies gather, where respite becomes possible, where collective breathing is invited…
For three years in a row, this conference has been a life‑boat for me — an accepting, inclusive environment where I can show live artwork without having to justify its form, its temporality, or its unruly methods. Under the care and leadership of Duncan, Carlie, Tom and James, the conference has offered me a rare breathing space: a place where practice‑as‑research is not only understood but actively embraced.
Within these fractures, people remember how to look sideways instead of upward. Conversation loosens from transactional shortcuts. Time briefly escapes extraction. The body unclenches enough to notice itself among other bodies. And in that noticing, another social possibility flickers: not competition, not optimisation, but mutual recognition, even if it is brief and fleeting unison with differing pluralitites, its still a shared room.
Our approach sits within a lineage shaped by Brad Haseman, Robin Nelson, Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, where knowledge is able to be expressed beyond language, generated through doing, sensing, and relation. It is a methodology that foregrounds co‑production and dissolves hierarchical structures of knower/recipient or creator/consumer. Instead, knowledge emerges in the encounter — in the shared, contingent space where bodies, materials, people meet.
I would like to thank the Creative Conference team, for providing me anchor points throughout my time at Gloucestershire University.
References:
Barrett, E. and Bolt, B. (eds.) (2007) Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. London: I.B. Tauris.
Bolt, B. (2004) Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image. London: I.B. Tauris.
Haseman, B. (2006) ‘A manifesto for performative research’, Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 118(1), pp. 98–106.
Nelson, R. (2013) Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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 epistemic violence. 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 hostility within 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 equipment and space that is conditional. 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. After explaining that the work incorporates sound and that uninterrupted bookings were necessary for documentation, that same staff member entered again the following Saturday and repeatedly struck the studio door with a vacuum cleaner. The abrupt, intrusive noise — a kind of institutional rupture — pushed me toward thinking with noise‑core practices, particularly their capacity to interrupt, and refuse normative expectations of order, and compliance. This opened a new line of enquiry: how the violent, uninvited sonic presence of the institution might be reworked as a decolonial element within the piece, exposing and 'inverting' the power dynamics embedded in who is allowed to make noise, who must remain quiet, and whose presence is treated as interruptible.
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.
