I am an artist with a curatorial practice, educator and researcher. Raised in a working-class family during Margaret Thatcher's attempts to evict the working class from intellectual life, I was the first person in my family to attend Higher Education.
MFA: Fine Art Programme Leader at Valand Academy, I have specific interests in the agency of artists, socially-engaged art that addresses complexes of relationality, participation and coercion; the curatorial and the exhibitionary as extended forms of artistic practice; critical heriatge and contemporary art, and performativity. I am informed by Queer thought and intersectional approaches.
As an artist I work primarily by commission and develop longitudinal projects that emanate from questions relating to social engagement, participation and coercion of 'publics'. I work with others who ultimately become responsible for the implementation of their fantasies of my work. This has included gravediggers, HIV+ Catholic priests, court artists, town criers and palantypists.
Commissioners include: Tramway (Glasgow), Institute Francais (Paris), Proboscis (London), ICA (London), Franklin Furnace (NYC), Situations (Bristol) and the Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester) by curators such as Claire Doherty, Francis McKee, Martha Wilson, Lois Keidan and Charles Esche among others. I recently contributed work to Watched! Art, Photography and Surveillance in Europe post 9/11, which toured. I am now working on a new art commission for 2018, which departs from questions of Queer time and radical education.
In 2014 I was awarded a Swedish Research Council grant to develop Stretched – a research project that seeks to contribute new knowledge on how artistic practice is assembled, expanded and stretched within the cultures of ‘artist-organisaton’. The project is co-researched with Mick Wilson and Julie Crawshaw. It has had multiple conference, seminar and publication outputs. In 2017 In Case There's a Reason: The Theatre of Mistakes opened at London's Raven Row and a further exhibition will take place with Baltic Contemporary Arts in December 2017.
My curatorial work has often focused on commisioning or surveys of obscured or intentially marginal practices. This has included the official presentation from Scotland at the Venice Biennale (2005), the first European career survey of the practices of Yvonne Rainer (Tramway, 2010), Monica Ross' Anniversary: acts of memory (2009-11) and Adhocracy (2012), which took an intersectional and incremental approach to the reprsentation of art within CND, the BLK Art Group, OUTrage and the Scratch Orchestra among others.
In 2017 the Univeristy of Gothenburg selected me as a future research leader. I am a board member of Paradox: the European Forum for Fine Art in H.E., a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and was a member of the working group that established PARSE (Platform for Artistic Research Sweden).
Until June 2015, I was affiliated as a researcher to the EU project, NEARCH (New Scenarios for a Community Involved Archeology). I was co-researcher on the Swedish Research Council Funded Project, Trust and Unfolding Dialogue in Contemporary Art and editor of the publication, Esther Shalev-Gerz The Contemporary Art of Trusting Uncertainties and Unfolding Dialogues.
I frequently present at seminars, panel discussions and conferences and have written widely on art and edited monographs and anthologies.
