Synapse has transformed! With a successful bid to Arts Council England, the expanded version of the work has been touring with Social Scaffolding Art Collective to six venues in the West of England during 2023. You can follow www.socialscaffolding.art to find out exactly where Synapse will be and when we are open. I will be at every venue inviting visitors to join me in stitching into the sculptures’ surfaces throughout the tour.

The first venue was Create@#8 in Shepton Mallet where we launched the tour and had nearly 600 visitors! The numbers went up at every venue engaging with over 8000 people in Weston super Mare, Gloucester, Bristol, Trowbridge & Swindon. The new pods have been stitched into transforming the blank canvas into a colourful, densely textured surface beyond my early imaginings.

Synapse began as a single human-scale, soft cocoon-like sculpture, which makes visible the imposed isolation of lockdown and the need to hold space and offer sanctuary for contemplation. The visceral, organic form, suspended within a scaffold hive, acts as both a stage set and a blank canvas for interactive social engagement. The surface of the installation undergoes a slow transformation through co-created stitch, bearing witness to participants’ conversations through a process of embodiment, investing the cumulative stories and emotions within the form.

Participants can climb into the pods, to be cradled in suspended animation, or physically explore the stretch and strain of the pod membranes in other ways. Visitors and community groups are invited to record experiences of isolation by stitching into the fabric of the sculptures and joining in conversations in sewing circle sessions.

Videos of the physical interactions and consequent animation of the sculpture, and of the transformation of the stitched surface, plus audio recordings of snatches of stories have been integrated within the space, allowing the different layers of human engagement to breathe life into the sculptures.

The pilot installation of Synapse in Taunton’s Orchard Shopping Centre happened during Somerset Artweeks 2022 from 24/9-9/10. Somerset Art Works awarded a development bursary to support the making of the first pod and the local council & shopping center management company facilitated the use of a vacant shop as the venue. Over 300 people visited the installation with many staying for more than an hour to stitch and chat with the artists.

The installation has also been exhibited at the Emerge residency showcase, Sion Hill Campus Bath Spa University 13-24/10 where it has been visited by several specific community groups for participatory sessions.

Videos are best experienced in full-screen format.

The Haptic Traces series received a highly commended in the Hauser & Wirth award at Black Swan Arts 2022 and in 2021 Haptic Traces Exposed won 1st prize in the Bath Open.

Haptic Traces is an ongoing performance drawing project exploring the relationship between myself and my experience of the space I move through be that personal, in interaction with others or environment, or in some cases existential. In some works the theme is predominant whilst in others, it may be an unconscious sub-theme, explored more through the language of drawn or sculptural form in space/time. Understanding, through recent & late diagnosis, that I am dyspraxic has changed the lens through which I perceive this aspect of my work and increased the importance I see of my own innate ability to explore social-emotional responses through empathy and existential interaction with environment and “other”, translating to self-embodiment in creative outcomes. Works explore flattening and fragmenting space & time, in a literal interpretation of the relationship between two and three dimensions and how mapping depicts the one through the other. The distortion through reanimation of still image references Frederick Jameson’s reaction to postmodernism, “with its saturation of social space by a visual consumer culture, (that) has replaced the modernist angst of the traditional subject, and with it the existential crisis of old, by a new social pathology of flattened affect and a fragmented subject”.

VR drawing project research studies 2019-21

Higher has developed as a partnership research project with Creative Computing graduate Dave Webb and Graphic Designer Harvey Jones. With support from the Studio Recovery Fund and CAMERA we have been able to explore the idea of visually communicating through dance to a new level. Please watch the video for more information where we have got to so far and check out the @static2ecstatic Instagram for more visuals.

Below are the original studies, documenting the differences in movement behaviour whilst dancing due to social inhibitions. Each slide shows the same person dancing to a track of their choice first watched, then crowded out by others encroaching on their personal space and finally left alone in the room with no external inhibitors.

Documentation is made digitally using ND filters to allow exposure for the duration of the selected music track and dancers had head torches strapped to their ankles, wrists & forehead. Many thanks to Kirsten Reynolds for her inspiring work and technical expertise that has enabled me to start this project.

Though these images have a real beauty of their own, they are initial studies to look for observable difference in movement behaviour due to social inhibition before I commence a much larger project tracking differences using VR sensors to capture the information in 3D.

Building on the long exposure experiments of Solo Dancer and “in the round” process of Mapping Loci, Drawing Disco tracks dancers in their unconscious motions using 3DVR off-the-shelf software.

The detail is less than long exposure as each dancer has only the one tracking point, but the abstract beauty of form created through motion remains an exciting launch point from which to develop.

Immersive interactive sound & projection installation 2020 (2m3 / 3 minutes 50 seconds)

Having had to reconsider approaches to socially engaged work in a post-COVID world, the concept for Human Murmuration has developed from our new reliance on the virtual worlds of social media and reflection on the vulnerabilities this presents. Physically the work deconstructs & reconstructs the Zoom screen wrapping the “virtual world” around the viewer, contained within a white cube space, illuminated like a virtual Rubix cube.

In itself, the white cube makes totemic reference to the aggressive capitalist consumerist marketisation of the artworld in the 90s by the likes of Saatchi & Joplin but containing an immaterial immersive experience that cannot be owned. At the same time connotation with the asylum space is apt when the work is both about and uses manipulation of human behaviour in the orchestration of phenomenological experiences for the audience.

Algorithms that feed our media streams are based on communications observed between murmuring starlings; the hive-mind has a continuous flow of information to control the group response through groupings of six or seven network links interlocking. That information can transfer so fast is exciting, however, the capacity to manipulate the transfer through false-feeds or tactical siloing is unnerving. Companies like Cambridge Analytica have been called out for exploiting the echo-chamber potential to influence elections and referendums around the globe.

Network theory behind global transfer of information is mathematically linked with six degrees of separation relies on super-connectors or hubs. Operating across-discipline and in wider-fields, I thrive as a super-connector and rely on chance encounters to feed my ideas. However, in lockdown physical chance encounters have been limited. Fortunately, I did meet Dave Webb, the coder who collaborated to make Human Murmuration. Choices made dimensioning the work have accounted for the exact constraints of social distancing in a post-COVID physical world while using all six sides of the cube which balances the concepts of caging and connecting.

Video conferencing has exploded as a form of communication in response to global lockdown and is an exciting new medium to explore and test boundaries. I have been developing the concept of chance encounter in the virtual world by inviting random followers of my own social media to meet for Zoom conversations to explore the process of conversation and coincidence as a topic itself and observe the differences when people are more or less connected.

From these experiments came Human Murmuration as I realised how much social media noise is actually Bot generated and many of the Bots use stolen real identities. Coders like Billy Chasen, create Botnet worlds exploring the development of sophistication in AI language between Bots and how this compares with the relatively banal things we find ourselves repeating for real in social media. The economy behind influencing social media and the power it has politically is both sophisticated & corrupt. Cambridge Analytica has not gone away, they have just changed their trading name.

In 2021 I have been assisted to redevelop Human Murmuration as a VR environment to enable the work to travel and be exhibited more extensively. It maintains a 2m cubed viewing space for the same sense of containment however the transparency of the temporary structure creates a very different illusion.

Datafield is a cross-discipline collaborative & participatory performance artwork created for video.

The first iteration of Datafield was co-created in February 2020 with 30 Bath Spa students. The final cut was shortlisted for the Visions of Science ArtPrize at The Edge 2020 and long-listed for UK New Artist 2022. Screenings have included, amongst others, Centre of Gravity, Bristol 2020, and Wiltshire Creative, Salisbury Playhouse 2021.

Expressions of interest in developing further iterations of the project on a growing scale are welcomed, especially as an induction activity for freshers on creative university courses.

Datafield was originally conceived for 100 participants in a 10x10 grid, anonymised by wearing second-skin bar chart costumes revealing their individuality and difference in unique silhouettes, ‘animated’ through movements that represent the participants’ choices.

The work has been created in collaboration with post-graduate research students at University of Bath specialising in sociology & maths. Surveys and workshops with students exploring the impact of information and data overload on the ability to make choices in life have informed the costumes & performance, whilst also supporting young people’s mental well-being, increasing confidence to engage with knowledge to help shape their own futures.

(Laid Out & Put Away series)
Cast ceramic & acrylic furniture 2019

Exhibited at 44AD Bath & RWA Bristol 2019
Installed at Emerge Studios, Sion Hill Campus Bath Spa University since 2020

Taking the concept of a ‘body of work’ literally, ‘Body As Evidence’ catalogs anthropometric data and explores the limitations of traditional sizing systems for women based on idealised proportional relationships and how this commoditisation of women epitomises the consumerist nature of our society.

Investigating the changing size, shape & composition of my own body, I have begun to realise that size is relative and the measures we use have not remained the same. Clothing has size inflation to match portion creep in what we eat so we can delude ourselves as a nation that we are not getting fatter.

The two series – Laid Out & Put Away – question customs & social decorum for display of the female form; how this affects personal identity and how we categorize ourselves & store our beliefs about beauty, entrenched in the folds of our clothes.

Exploring the properties of clay & ceramic is core to the work, contrasting pliability & stretch with rigidity & fragility, reflecting the physical & emotional states of the body & mind at different stages in life. The use of high gloss shop display style acrylic plinths for the work contrasts strongly with the traditionality of ceramic used since the first Venus figurines. Further referencing plays between domestic furniture and archivist glazed display cabinets with specimin-filled drawers.

Touring exhibition of work produced during the Porthleven Prize Residency, exhibited at Bath Spa Sion Hill / Bath Spa Locksbrook / Porthleven Lifeboat Station, Cornwall.

Please see the information below about the work and further blog updates for the inaugural Porthleven Arts Festival 2021 when Sink or Swim, Swinging the Lead and All at Sea were re-exhibited. Three Sheets to the Wind was simultaneously exhibited at Mall Galleries, London for the Royal Society of Marine Artists annual open 2021.

Digitally printed design 2018
RiV Project artist commission
Exhibited at Bath Quays Forest of the Imagination 2019
Green Park Festival of Nature 2019
Bath University Campus 2019
With artist talks at The Edge & 44AD
Amsterdam Waterways festival 2020

The inspiration for Flood Flags is the historic depth markings under Ha’penny Bridge and visually mapping a sense of the volume of water that collected during these events. The flags were designed to be sited in the new flood conveyance park a little further down the river translating the depths to demonstrate how the body of water would now be dissipated.

Having studied the archived flood mapping I used the topographical shapes to inspire the patterns of water within the flag fabric design and the different flood depths are demarked by subtle changes in colour and identification of each year flooding occurred.

The work was commissioned as part of the River is the Venue project linking artists with researchers at University of Bath to explore sensory outcomes from academic investigations.

Graphite on stitched baking parchment 2018
Exhibited in Only Human at 44AD for FAB18
Solo exhibition, Body of Work, at The Art Cohort 2020

In life we are bombarded with imagery, including the current trend to generate copious self-images, few of which go unfiltered except when they are being scandalized as exposés on how people have “let themselves go”. This obsession with editing a virtual version of ourselves is not only affecting the mental well-being of individuals but changing the self-perceptions of society and how people interact. 

Hanging Out makes an overt statement to celebrate the beauty of reality with eight super-real portraits of women in the flesh. Women with freckles, wrinkles, asymmetry, bulgy bits, scars and the stories of their lives mapped out on their wonderful bodies. Each body is drawn from life onto a paper copy of a favourite item of clothing, selected by each woman for making them feel comfortable in themselves, so instead of the clothing covering them up it acts as the canvas for their portrait, revealing the inside on the outside.

More and more people are body phobic as reality does not match with the filtered virtual world projected all around us and we feel most vulnerable when naked. Hanging Out speaks on multiple levels working with such delicate and fragile materials contrasting with almost brazenly real imagery of the human form asking us to consider where our misperceptions are. 

The (1 in 8) sub-theme in Hanging Out makes reference to the power of data reporting on health and the impact this also has on mental health. The work is dedicated to the memory of my inspiring friend, Eve White, who encouraged me to return to professional arts practice to celebrate what we have and can do and who is missed as considerably more than an absent statistic.

Part 1 Artist book with 21 drypoint prints bound in sheet lead 2018
Part 2 Cast & sheet lead, paper labels & museum casing  2018

Part 2 Exhibited at RWA Sculpture Open 2019
Part 1 & 2 Exhibited at 44AD 2020

Studying & recording relics of the modern age, cataloguing small broken objects that indicate an expression of anxiety, I have archived the debris left behind in my classroom like a museum of archeological small finds. The processes involved to replicate these small & obscure objects have challenged my technical skills to create an alchemic beauty in their transformation to artworks in print (Part 1) or sculpture (Part 2).

I am fascinated by the personal traces embodied in each “involuntary sculpture”, reminiscent of Surrealist works by Brassai and taking further inspiration from lead curse tablets found in the local Roman Baths. Lead is associated with weight, death, incarceration & alchemy so it seems particularly apt for recording these transient objects as witnesses to the poisonous nature of anxiety as an illness that is ransacking our younger generations.

Exhibited 2019: Bath Spa Sion Hill, St Mary’s Calne, 44AD Bath, 2020: The Art Cohort Bath, 2022: Black Swan Arts & Gallery at the Station Frome.

Jesmonite & terracotta (2019 remake)
Brass wax finished air-drying clay & engraved brass dish (1999 original work)

Strange Fruit relates to my current interests in its exploration of the body and ideas of social apathy in accepting unacceptable situations or attitudes. It is provocatively sensual and sexual; somewhere between sex toys and overripe fruit.

It was originally inspired by the exposure of the damage done through the use of DES as a pharmaceutical drug during pregnancy and as a steroid in the meat industry and the ongoing legacy of damage this has caused in physical and psychological sexual & gender differences.

This is a topic that is becoming even more contentious with the growing prevalence of gender-transition treatments available today which may be both a relief for those born as DES sons or daughters or may add to future problems.

Returning to this work has reawakened my feelings about the complexities of both science & religion as unchallenged belief systems and the damage that can occur in the name of improvement.

Sheet lead & cast wax 2018

Exhibited Holburne Museum Bath & St Mary’s Calne 2019, Milsom Place Bath 2020, Black Swan Arts & Gallery at the Station Frome 2022.

Perfect symbols of fatalist consumer society, Body Bags weigh in at 5kg & 10kg empty and came about through re-imagining weight I have recently lost. I wanted to consider the infeasibility of carrying it around on a regular basis, but whilst the weight was part of me, inescapably that is exactly what I did. I am fascinated by how bodies can change size, shape & composition yet we can delude ourselves that we are not in control, rather we are victim to society for misconceptions & insecurities, looking to retail therapy to save us from ourselves. The void inside the bags, leaving the manufacture & construction seams clear to see, speaks volumes in abhorrence at the trickery of this substitution theory.

Weight is a small artefact, exquisitely worked, exploring weight of meaning in form. Linked to Body Bags it asks questions about our obsession with consumerism and overconsumption, suggesting perhaps the weight in our pockets might be our downfall.

Six Pack is made from cast wax, coated in lard; perceived by many as the epitome of fat, something disgusting. The use of tablet format to conceptualise our own body fat externally provokes a sense of revulsion that we seem to have lost in our society-wide acceptance of obesity as the new norm. The work can be configured in a variety of formats: Bellyful, Pound of Flesh or Six Pack, all playfully alluding to our obsessions with excess in diet, extortion & bodybuilding. The use of lard has a subtle and more hopeful homage to Joseph Beuys who believed in it’s healing properties that might greatly benefit our society.