IN DEVELOPMENT
Digital Immersive Experience
Artist / Producer
25 year anniversary reimagining footage shot at my father's pit, Annesley Bentinck Colliery. In 1999, as my father was dying from coal dust it was announced his pit would close. Retracing my father’s footsteps I spent time at the colliery documenting its dying days, descending underground, travelling the microwave mile to the coalface. This immersive experience aims to give a physical sense of the mine, the men’s relationship with it, with each other, their identity and community.
Images around mining always start with miners’ bodies. The starkness of being human, stripped of any signs of civilization, crawling around in darkness. The body on all fours. Men having to trust that nature will bring them back to the light. Everything in mining is about relationships. Present and past. Daylight and the darkness of the mine. Ascent, descent. The human and the natural. The physical and the psychological.
The story of mining is about a relationship between the mine and the men and about the relationships between the men themselves. How often have we heard about the ‘crack’, the camaraderie, the ‘watching out for each other’. How does working in a dark, dangerous hole day after day affect how the men relate to each other? How does this looking out for each other translate in the twenty first century? It seems an old-fashioned thing, this empathy and shared experience in the context of our dissolving communities.
ILLUSTRATED STORYBOOK
A eco-heroine for the 21st century.
A girl with the gift of magic antlers sets out to mend a broken world. Deergirl is about kindness and courage. For in the darkness there are new friends to be found.
For +10 yr olds.
“Deergirl is a unique storybook because children can strongly associate with a heroine who, against all odds, is able to overcome hardship.” Sophie Holdforth, The Learning Trust.
I first started drawing after breaking my wrists in a hit and run accident. As a way of getting my hands and fingers to work again, I picked up a pencil and started doodling.
Drawing everyday I didn’t know where it would take me. All I knew was it made me better. Over time, the character of Deergirl appeared. Piecing together fragments of images, a bigger story suggested itself. A story of magic, kindness and courage.
Deergirl reminds us that everything is connected, human, animals, and our earth are interlinked like family. We need super heroes to protect the world, its diversity and technicolour beauty.
Commissioned by the Arts Council of England
Black and white photography archive of 1,000+ still images that document my father's pit, Annesley Bentinck’s closure at the end of 1999-2000. After his death from miners lung, I retraced his footsteps and spent 3 months documenting the colliery's dying days, talking to miners about their relationship with the pit, thoughts about masculinity and what a new life means in a new millennium.
Commissioned by the Arts Council of England, for Year of the Artist.
Initial concept drawings for coal pillow sculptures. Developed and created from conversations with ex-coalminers after the closure of their pit, Annesley Bentinck.
A pillow, a place to lay your head. And dream.
ESCAPE subverts traditional coal sculptures, representations of miners holding Davey lamps. Embedded in each coal pillow sculpture a miner's creative process is made real.
Inspired by my coal-miner father's quiet creativity. After leaving the industry, he spent his time wanting to heal horses and dreamt up inventions for a horse jacuzzi.
Shown at the National Coal Mining Museum of England and acquired for their permanent collection.
Video / coal / bandage installation.
Commissioned for GIRL, a touring exhibition for the Arts Council of England.
A landscape of coal fills the space, bandaged children's shoes in the darkness. Shadows of children projected onto them. Ghostly. They sing, 'Wallflowers' a playground game that confronts mortality and death.
Shown at New Walsall Art Gallery, Impressions Gallery, York.
