I trained as an architect and practice as an artist, whose practice often engages with the public realm.

My recent practice and research has explored material poetics, memory, heritage and regeneration. In my PhD, 'Détour and Retour: Practices and poetics of salt as narratives of relation and re-generation in Brixton', I proposed that a 'poetics of re-generation' could allow a renegotiation of the instrumentalised term regeneration, expanding the language of regeneration and spatialising relational practice to emphasise an ethics of regeneration practices.

Therefore from a practice perspective, I'm interested in how artistic interventions and critical spatial practices that highlight and reveal poetics of place could contribute to more ethical and effective models of regeneration (including a more ethical engagement with pasts of a place, spectral traces and relation to the new).

I'm currently working on Acts of Transfer, a practice-based research project, funded by Arts Council England, and the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at UoB, in collaboration with Dr Lizzie Lloyd (UWE), into the spaces and subjectivities of socially engaged practice and critical writing about the practice.

Through my PhD I became involved with the work of the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant and his poetics of Relation. I'm currently working on research that seeks to understand how we can take Glissant's ideas into spatial and social practice in art and architecture.

I'm interested in the material cultures of migration and trade - which connect the historical and present - for example salt, which formed the basis of my PhD work. I'm interested in the relevance and significance of everyday practices, rituals and engagement with material culture to how places are made and continue to be remade and maintained.

Some of my recent artistic projects have explored textiles as a medium, and as part of collaborative research project Making Suburban Faith I worked with Professor Claire Dwyer and researcher Nazneen Ahmed at UCL to produce a collaborative textile art project, which has been written up in a number of papers and chapters, as well as an artists book (see outputs).

Other current art practice and research focuses on Yiddish political cultures in the Jewish East End from the 1880s to the 1930s. This research which has been funded by the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories was presented in an online exhibition in December 2020 and was the focus of an event in June 2021 with Tim Ingold, Ben Gidley and Rachel Garfield.  

I’m interested in supervising practice-based PhDs, particularly those that are interdisciplinary and combine aspects of art practice and theory with architecture/urban studies/spatial practice alongside other disciplines and practices (and may have a socially engaged or participatory element), and which might explore themes of migration, heritage, contested space and regeneration.

Current PhD Students: 

Ilenia Atzori: From ruins to community heritage: The role of storytelling in building a collective memory

Antony Dixon: Here is where we meet (Body, Matter and Things): A sensory investigation, through co-creative practice, of the misplaced and found.

Jessica Melville-Brown: Co-designing the future: An exploration into the development of new methods for creative engagement, examining the influence of gender roles, socio-economic and ethno-cultural factors in the co-design process with young people.

PhD Examinations: 

James O'Leary: Interface Architecture: Towards the transformation of Belfast's 'Peacewalls' through Situated Practice (Internal Examiner)

M Phil examinations:

Lida Driva: The Operation of the Hidden. Towards an understanding of architectural and urban space: the case of Omonia Square (External Examiner)