So where am I?

I’m in Leeds, in the first year of an MA in Creative Practice at Leeds College of Art.  I’m writing this in my small studio.  I’m exploring the ideas and practices that illuminate the kaleidoscopic connections between people and place, space and the non-human world.  In my case, me as a woman and everything else.

I aim to express these connections and stories through a range of creative practices.  These include 35mm film and camera-less photography, drawing, indexical mark-making, artist’s books, print-making, image transfer for conceptual purposes (for example, using stones and other found materials, and fabric soaked off the back of old maps), as well as social practice and place-based interventions.

I am looking for traces of the relationship between people and places, the stories we leave behind, and the complex meanings we create from our experience of place.  Some of this fits within the broad arena of psychogeography, and extends from there into humanistic geography and cultural studies.  I also wonder about the place of art in challenging power and safeguarding vulnerability.  I would like to be able, through my artistic practice to, as Bracha Ettinger puts it, express “care and compassion, in wonder and reverence”.  I am also interested in making visible that which is often unseen and in telling stories which are often not heard.

Before I retired I worked with people on change and development, and before that I did a fair bit of political activism.  I can’t seem to let this go and am trying to find ways to include working with people in my creative practice.