Artist filmmaker and academic. Berlin/Edinburgh.
querying the ways that authority is constructed
How do embodied experiences of individuals within the institution shape institutional practices?
I connect with communities of research and scholarship, such as botany and medicine, in which knowledge is often positioned as objective, to examine relationships between knowledge, experience and authority.
I devise contexts for in-depth conversations (public forums or intimate settings), analyse practices (the physical techniques and processes of learning) and access archives to collaboratively explore undocumented ways that personal experiences inform ‘objective’ knowledge and its institutional practices.
This generates questions around the values placed on different forms of knowledge and methods of enquiry, the hierarchies that result from these values, and the subjects that become other by ways of thinking that institutional authority produces.
These questions actualise relations between subjective and objective knowledge to reveal undisclosed frameworks. My work aims to articulate these frameworks to confront the construction of authority, and uncover practices that redress imbalances between institutions and our private lives.
I also curate screening programmes, symposiums and assemblies for expanded discussions: The Agent RiA; New Mothers’ Assembly; Say-So; Viewing Voices.
Mentoring / Teaching
2024 - ongoing, Project Mentor, MA Film Practice, Arts University Bournemouth, UK
2023 - ongoing, independent mentor (visual arts) for: practice-based PhDs; new work production and development; artists’ moving image projects. [If you would like to talk about mentorship for your project send me an email.]
From 2013 - 2022 I was Lecturer in Fine Art at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, UK.
I have also taught on the Post-Graduate Film Studies programme at the University of Edinburgh, Undergraduate programme in Sculpture at University of Dundee, and Foundation Course at Leeds College of Art, UK.
Education + Academic Research
I was the first in my family to go on to further education. I studied at Cumbria College of Art, Carlisle (Foundation); Central Saint Martins College of Art, London (BA Hons); and Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh (PhD).
My funded PhD in Art was co-supervised in Cognitive Philosophy by Prof Andy Clark, FBA. Titled, Voicing Uncertainty, my research focuses on the role of Voice in Artists’ Moving Images. Using concepts of embodiment and extension from the Philosophy of Cognition, Voicing Uncertainty examines processes of practice that are comfortable with uncertainty, producing the experience of being heard for both the maker and the viewer.
Exhibitions and Events
Recent exhibitions and events include: Sea Change Film Festival, Tiree; Confabulations X Health & Care, Royal College of Art, London; Contemporary insights from historical objects, artist’s talk, Charité, Berlin; Listening Forward Symposium, IMPULS Festival, Leipzig; Confabulation: (Re)producing Reproduction, Durham University and Queens University, Ontario; Desert is a Forest, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; Re-Rooting, Folkestone Triennial Fringe; Florilegium, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh; New Mothers Assembly, Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop; Seeing Systems, videoclub + ArtScience Museum, Singapore; Utter, Utter, Utter, Cooper Gallery, Dundee; Character Double, LUX Scotland; >>FFWD, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; The Extended Voice, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Say-so, Glasgow Film Festival + MAP; Viewing Voices, Edinburgh International Film Festival, with Scottish Documentary Institute, and LUX, London; Lyndsay Mann, (solo) Careof Center for Contemporary Art, Milan.
