Hello,
I am a queer artist, dancer, family constellations practitioner and facilitator, tending to the re-membrance of embodied knowing, and listening to land and its relations.
My work seeks to attend the impact of colonial capitalism's enclosures of land, bodies and practices, asking how the land guides and gives rise to transformative justice and abolitionist futures.
All processes begin with those who came before; if you’re interested to hear more, read on….
❤️
In my early twenties I stumbled upon a huge field of Native American literature. Authors like Joy Harjo and Leslie Silko were integral to my love of story, as well as my understanding of ongoing settler-colonialism. I worked as an independent journalist reporting on the early years (2011-2013) of trans-tribal movement Idle No More. I am ever indebted to the life changing words and worlds of Leslie M Silko, N Scott Momaday, Linda Hogan, Joy Harjo, Gerald Vizenor, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Simon Ortiz, James Welch, Jeanette Armstrong, Louise Erdrich and more.
I began exploring my relation to settler colonialism and its roots in my ancestral lands, as well as the latter’s ecologies and mythologies. From 2011 - 2014 I worked as an independent storyteller and with the Crick Crack Club, delving into memories held in land, bodies and story itself as a living, breathing, animate being to track and listen for.
I found my way into dance, improvisation and performance, centering embodied knowing and ways of contacting deep time memory and more-than-human lifeworlds. I was lucky to work with teachers and artists such as Stephanie Maher, Keith Hennessey, Maria Scarroni, Kathleen Hermsdorf, Julyen Hamilton, Billie Hanne, Frank Van der Ven, Margaret Pikes, Stephanie Skura… I made my own work and performed for others, including Isabel Lewis and Silvia Palacios Whitman.
In 2014 I embarked on a PhD to contribute a land listening practice to the steadily growing field of art and ecology. Supported by an AHRC grant, I encountered a river in the North of England on an artistic research trip. I returned to this river over the next five years. It took me on an embodied, somatic journey unearthing the history of the European witch-hunts and their intersection with transAtlantic slavery and Indigenous genocide in ongoing settler-colonial contexts. I asked how the body can be witness both to historical trauma and simultaneously the imagination of an otherwise that is being propelled by river, stone, land. I focussed on the life force of rivers as an intelligence that propels all systemic and ancestral healing.
I developed a practice of constellations emerging from the land and more-than-human collaborators in this time, called “the unearthings”, and received my PhD in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University in 2020.
My art has since evolved to include painting, textiles and natural dyeing. When facilitating, I share a land based pedagogical approach integrating decolonial discourse and embodied listening to more-than-human and ancestral presences. My work sits between art and collective liberation practices, through community ceremony and systemic constellations.
I love to be in collaboration, and am member of Decolonising Botany, working group initiated by Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe and launched at Liverpool Bienniale 2021, LARK: Living Archive of Re-membered Knowledges with Shelley Etkin, and trans-disciplinary collective Hungry Mothers, instigated by artist Tyler Rai. These groups explore, in different ways, decolonial approaches to ecology, land, knowledge sharing and solidarity.