writing-teaching--talks
In July 2023, I was diagnosed with pre-invasive breast cancer (Ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS). This diagnosis led to a series of surgeries taht took place over a six month period. Throughout – in a body of work entitled Becoming Rock – I used photography, film, and drawing to document my experience and emplaced (and photographed) my body in various landscape sites chosen for their physical, psychological and metaphorical resonance.
In the book Sites of Transformation: Applied and Socially Engaged Scenogrphy in Rural Landscapes, I examine the expanding field of socially engaged scenography and the development of scenography as a distinctive type of applied art and performance practice that seeks tangible, therapeutic, and transformative real-world outcomes.It is what Christopher Baugh calls ‘scenography with purpose’.
I have published books, book chapters, e-publications and journal articles. My book Sites of Transformation was published on 24th February 2022 by Bloomsbury Methuen and is due out in paperback on 24 August 2023. It was shorlisted for the prestigous Prague Quadrennail Best Book Awards 2023.
My article 'Dorothy Wordsworth and her Female Contemporaries’ Legacy: A feminine ‘material’ sublime approach to the creation of walking-performance in mountainous landscapes' was published in (eds.) Jonathan Pitches and David Shearing Performance Research: On Mountains (2019), 24: 2.
In 2016 I was awarded a PhD in Theatre Studies from Lancaster Institute of the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University. The title of my written thesis is: Emplacing, Re-Imaging and Transforming ‘Missing’ Life-Events: A Feminine Sublime Approach to the Creation of Socially Engaged Scenography in Site-Specific Walking-Performance in Rural Landscapes.
Through my practice and research, and a close study of Dorothy Wordsworth and her female comtemporaries approach to, and way of engaging with landscape, I has developed 'Seven Scenographic Principles'. These principles apply the concept of the feminine 'material' sublime, which offers a counterpoint to the ‘masculine’ or ‘transcendent sublime’.
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I regularly exhibit my practice and research often curating my site-specific walking-performance works into galleries sapced where objects, sound, film and performance elements are distilled into installations. Most recently in Decemember 2021 when I exhibted Tell it to the Bees at the Maketank Gallery in Exeter.
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I regularly talk about and present my practice and research at conferences and symposiums as well as in the press, media and on radio broadcasts.
During lockdown I was unable to deliver a talk at the British Library, instead the library recorded a blog in which I discuss the Dorothy's Room installation and my Walks to Remember memory-walk project both of which were inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth’s 'menory-walking' and her Rydal Journals.
I have 30 years experience as a visiting and associate lecturer in Higher Education at undergraduate and postgraduate level. I am regularly invited as a guest lecturer to give talks and presentations on my practice and research, and deliver an annual lecture and workshop on the MA in Performance Design at Leeds University. I was an External Examiner for the BA Performance Design and Practice Central St Martin’s, UAL, London (2014-18).
Walking the Menopause is an ongoing project began in 2021 that creates site-specific menopause-walks in a range of landscapes and places across. Some of the walks are created and led by me for occasions such as World Menopause Day or International Women's Day. Whilst others are made in collaboration with a individuals or groups and are bespoke to the people involved and their particular experiences of the peri/menopause transition.
Hysterectomy: BedRock is a new body of work currently in development that I am making in response to personal experiences of a hysterectomy, necessary due to the growth of a fibroid in and around my womb, and its challenging physical and psychological consequences, including a surgical menopause. The proejct is designed to imaginatively reveal and express the hysterectomy process from diagnosis and surgery to recovery, surgical menopause, and beyond.
Tell it to the Bees was a honeybee-inspired walking-performance specifically created for Exeter city centre. The performance led participants on a route through the city centre and, pausing at a number of locations where through words, music, film and actions time, reflected upon the relevance of these traditions to experiences during the Covid-19 Pandemic and our recovery from it.
During the spring-summer lockdown (and beyond) people have created memory-maps of walks they have not been able to do phyically. I have now compiled a gallery of the maps, words and photos of those who shared their remembered walks with me.
Image: Awena Carter's Walk Around the Cwm: ‘To Walk was My Delight’ memory map.
‘what a labour of joy and love it has been….‘there are so many memories of people woven into the walk’ (Awena Carter, 2020)
Lockdown in Lancaster and Morecambe: Walk, Run, Pedal, Push, Map makes visible the paths and places that participating residents of Lancaster and Morecambe visited during the COVID-19 lockdown in spring-summer 2020. These are the paths and places that gave us breathing space – mentally, emotionally and physically.
Dorothy's Room is an immersive installation originally created in Dorothy Wordsworth’s bedroom at Rydal Mount in Ambleside, Cumbria and inspired by Dorothy’s Rydal Journals in which she was bed-bound relying on memory to transport herself into the landscape she had once walked. Dorothy's Room is a companio to the related Women's Walks to Remember: 'With Memory I was there.'
Women’s Walks to Remember: 'With Memory I was there' is a ‘surrogate’ walking-art project specific to the Lake District that re-walks significant walks of those who are no longer able to walk them. The walk might have been for work, leisure, adventure, health, remembrance, creativity, science, companionship or solitude. The reason that the walk can no longer be done might be due to the effects of ageing, illness, accident or circumstance.
The process of creating Mulliontide (2016) led to a project entitled Harold's Walk: A Walk to Remember.
A new site-specific performance-installation entitled Remembrance: Returning, We Hear The Larks (November 2018). Created in and for Lancaster Priory to mark the centenary of the end of World War One as part of Light Up Lancaster 2018
Mulliontide was a coastal walking-perofmance from Poldhu Cove to Mullion Cove in Cornwall that focused on a much-loved landscape and explores the places where land, sea and people meet. The performance noticed the effects of tide and time, acknowledged deep feelings for place and recognised the challenges of change – personal and topographical.
Mulliontide: A Guide for Walkers, enables others to undertake the coastal walk from Poldhu Cove to Mullion Cove that I created in 2016 in collaboration with residents of Mullion, Cornwall.
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Warnscale: A Land Mark Walk Reflecting on In/Fertility and Childlessness is a self guided walk specific to, and created in, Warnscale, an area of fells to the south of Buttermere Lake.
The Gathering / Yr Helfa was a site-specific walking-performance based on the annual fertility, reproductive and life-cycles of the ewes at Hafod y Llan Farm, Snowdon, Wales.
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Fissure (20 - 22 May 2011), was a unique walking performance that unfolded over three days in the Yorkshire Dales. It was an extraordinary encounter between artists, scientists, audiences and landscape that explored life, death, grief and renewal.
Ghost Bird (15 & 16 September 2012), was a silent walking-performance and live-art installation specific to the Langden Valley in the Trough of Bowland, an upland landscape internationally important for its heather moorland, blanket bog and rare birds.
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Jack Scout (17 - 26 Sept 2010) was a walking-performance specific to Jack Scout, an intimate location in Silverdale, Lancashire, of bewitching beauty and extraordinary aesthetic, cultural and scientific value overlooking the vast sands and tides of Morecambe Bay.
Still Life was an intertidal performance specific to the sands of Morecambe Bay and the shoreline at Far Arnside in Sept 2008 and rev. 2009. It was created and performed by Louise Ann Wilson and Nigel Stewart.
Mothering Sunday is for many people a challenging and painful day. In acknowledgement of this I have collaborated with the arists Rachel-Ann Powers to create a space in the St Nicholas Chapel where the absences, losses and longings experienced around Mothering Sunday can be acknowledged and held.
Close-up Clougha Pike is a collection of photographs that capture the extraordinary colour, texture and form of the lichens growing on the rocks at Clougha Pike fell.
