Arts-based social practice projects.
please enquire for a full CV.
Photo of Personal Accounts installed at Talbot Rice Gallery.
Personal Accounts, Gabrielle Goliath
2024, produced with Talbot Rice Gallery
In collaboration with Richa Okhandiar-MacDougall, I was responsible for community facilitation before and during the production of the Edinburgh cycle of this project. Working closely with Gabrielle Goliath as well as the curatorial and production team at Talbot Rice Gallery.
“Personal Accounts is a transnational, decolonial, black feminist project of repair. In this immersive and deeply affecting series of video and sound cycles, Goliath addresses the global normativity of patriarchal violence, working in close collaboration with survivors and allies in Johannesburg, Tunisia, Oslo, Milan, Stellenbosch and now Edinburgh.” - Talbot Rice Gallery website
Exhibitions of the Edinburgh cycle of this project (Mango Blossoms):
Talbot Rice Gallery October, 2024 - February, 2025.
The Venice Biennale 2024, Central Pavillion, April 2024 - November 2024
Image courtesy of McPin Foundation.
Dance/Connect
2020 - 2024, funded by the World Health Organisation (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Arts & Health at UCL and funded by the UKRI Loneliness and Social Isolation in Mental Health Network.
Dance/Connect was a Social Biobehavioural Science study. The study applied the social cure framework to investigate how online group dance could benefit young people with anxiety. I was part of the intergenerational, multidisciplinary research team. My role included co-production, community facilitation, data analysis, and written and spoken presentation of data.
Arts and Mental Health Co-Research with Youth Advisors: The Role of Emotions, Creating Community, Learning and Growth (I co-authored this article with the research team for a special issue of Youth Journal).
Expanding the social cure: a mixed-methods approach exploring the role of online group dance as support for young people (aged 16–24) living with anxiety (project conclusion, authored by senior researchers).
Co-production, Commoning, and Community Empowerment (I received an independent commission for the Mental Health Research Matters Campaign about my ideas of commoning and community empowerment in research spaces).
Scottish Ballet, Moving Minds Immersive Conference, I presented my ideas of using commoning in academic research spaces and facilitated a reflexive exercise for attendees.
Re-assessing Normal
2019 - 2020, funded by Edinburgh Futures Institute.
“Corporeal Critiques: How Can We Harness Choreography to Re-assess The Notion of Normal?”
Google searches of ‘what’s normal?’; ‘whats normal?’; ‘What is normal?’ and ‘is it normal...’ return a combined 17,410,000,000 results, from which a social fixation on normal emerges. With so many fearing abnormality -perpetuated by the often-interpreted singular voice of data - this public fixation solidifies the need for a personal, pluralised approach to data. I used an IPA approach, gathering data through focus groups and existing material to understand the body’s relation to ‘normal.’ channeling my findings of conformation and rebellion into practical workshops titled The Brick House of Normal.
The employment of choreography to re-imagine and re-assess normal challenges the potential singularity in the expression and interpretation of data with dance being a pursuit of interpretative, anatomical, temporal, and sentient plurality. Additionally, the use of a marginalised, embodied art form (dance), reflects the plurality of subjectivities that fall through the gaps in data representation and the queerness of introspective rebellion.