I trained as an architect and practice as an artist, with an interdisciplinary, research-based practice.

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 developed ideas that linked material cultures of salt through a series of journeys to a 'poetics of re-generation', expanding the language of regeneration and spatialising relational practice to emphasise an ethics of regeneration practices. I'm interested in the material cultures of migration and trade and 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. My book, Salted Earth: poetics of place and migration through four artistic journeys, will be published by Intellect in 2025.

My research and practice engages with place, and the public realm. 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 and heritage practices (including a more ethical engagement with memory traces and their relation to the new).

I’m a board member of ixia (public art sector support) and am engaged in current research and policy around public art in the UK.

I originally trained in participatory research methods and tools and I bring an in depth knowledge and experience of participation and socially engaged practice to my teaching, research and practice, across architecture, art and design.

Current and recent research projects and networks:

A Difficult Place: Cost of Living collaborative film project

This Ignite 3.1 (AHRC impact funding) funded project has worked with people living in the East Brighton area to create a film documenting experiences of the current cost of living crisis. In partnership with Phoenix Food Shop, an affordable food project based in the Phoenix Community Centre, we identified people who are currently using their resources and then worked with these individuals to tell their stories, supported by myself and filmmaker (John Edwards). The resulting film, ‘A Difficult Place’, has been screened in Brighton and will be shared at a forthcoming webinar and at a London venue. This project aims to document the experiences that people are going through on a local level and to share these stories more widely so that these stories become more visible and people are not just seen as statistics.

The Salt Art Research Network is an international network of artists and curators working with, or interested in working with salt as material and theme of artistic practice. Members are currently based in the UK and Italy and have affiliations with the University of Brighton, Teesside University, Goldsmiths and University of Turin. In 2024 the Network is collaborating with NICHE, Universita Ca’ Foscari in Venice for a workshop event which is planned to lead to further research activities in 2025.

The DISTERRA network is funded by the UKRI’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. It is hosted at the University of Edinburgh and led by Nichola Khan, and Zoha Waseem (University of Warwick). It crosses knowledge boundaries by bringing together transdisciplinary academics, public audiences, artists and creative practitioners to explore ‘terrains of disappearance’ in forced migration, armed conflict, and environmental crisis across Asia-Europe. Its aim is to link typically separated regional or single-issue fields of inquiry. It brings together transdisciplinary scholarship and a creative arts focus to interrogate migrant disappearances as a generalised Asia-Europe phenomenon, but one with particularity in specific emplaced environments. It expands the priority given to border-related disappearances in migration by examining wider interactions of migration with forced displaced and disappearances as forms of absence in everyday life, including in cities.

Acts of Transfer – research project with Dr Lizzie Lloyd, UWE.

A practice-based research project, into the documentation and legacies of socially engaged practice and critical writing about the practice (2021-22). The project was funded by Arts Council England, and the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at UoB, and outcomes included 2 symposia at UoB, talks at Arnolfini and workshops at Towner Eastbourne and Fontys University. A book, Acts of Transfer, published by Social Art Publications is available. We are currently working on a online exposition showcasing the films and texts produced in the project.

Origination

An ongoing artistic research and practice project in collaboration with my sister, artist Rebecca Beinart, which we have been working on since 2008. Beginning as an investigation into our family history and migrations, growing into a wider project about the materiality, memory, and rituals of migration and diaspora, we have used performance, sculpture, film and other media to explore lost and invisible heritages. Outputs in 2024 included a residency at Fabrica and we have a forthcoming book chapter out in 2025.

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)

Jina Lee: Drawing ‘New Maps’: Critical Cartography and Ethnographical Enquiry Through Drawing Practice (External Examinar)

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)