Artist / Producer / Cultural Worker
(She/They)
I am a participatory artist and cultural worker* with a background in community organising. I work with people to think about collective and creative responses to social injustice. My artistic practice is interdisciplinary: involving verbatim, applied performance, Theatre of the Oppressed, participation action research, public space interventions, video with community organising and legal rights work. i identify as queer and neurodiverse which informs my practice.
My work is process led, participatory and embedded within and celebrates the context from which it comes. It aims platform the creative expression of folks who experience barriers to the arts. work exists in community centres, streets, estates, harbours, markets, town halls, theatres and online.
in 2021 I have been awarded Arts Council England's Developing Your Creative Practice Grant to explore womxn workers rights and develop some theatre writing and seed some projects. This has has led to Following The Fish Workers / Guts, currently in development.
I’m a former organiser with Focus E15 Campaign (East London) mother led resistance to housing injustice. I’ve been lucky enough to work as a Human Rights Organiser with Participation and the Practice of Rights: working with young people in Belfast on participatory housing justice and creative interventions such as a permanent mural on the international peace wall. I was Creative Lead for a the ‘Sunflower Week’ of action 2020 working with arts activists The Yes Men and PPR’s Build Homes Now: young people tackling homelessness in Belfast.
I am co-writer, director & producer for the critically acclaimed 'Land of The Three Towers Vol1' (2016) and LOTTT VOL II (2018) as Co Artistic Director of You Should See The Other Guy Theatre Co. This verbatim musical and community workshop series toured London estates facing demolition, supported by Arts Council England, Network for Social Change and Edge Fund. I am creative producer & co-director for ‘WOMB WITH A VIEW’, Winners of Independent Association of Festivals 2017. My solo writing credits include 'DEPRESCOS' (2014) and 'A Riot Act: Mums Go To Iceland' (2013) written from extensive research into issues of exploitation.
My practice as a theatre maker and facilitator focuses on using theatre as a transformative space : one of self expression and reflection, a place to unpick the claws of society and work through oppressions experienced in the outside world.
In the words of my mentor Ali Campbell, JFDI "Stop talking and Just F**king Do it".
*Cultural Worker :
I use the term Cultural Worker to define my practice. Devyn Springer explains the use of this really well:
"Cultural worker has a moral positioning embedded into it, as well as an inherent accountability. To call oneself a cultural worker, as opposed to a creative, is to essentially say that your labor, or at least a particular fraction of it, occurs with the intention to uphold a certain culture. It proposes that your labor as an artist, your work in art and literature, is accountable to the idea of culture. And, if we as organizers and anti-racists and socialists and communists and revolutionaries are committed to upholding a revolutionary culture, then our labor as cultural workers is accountable to the notion of working to uphold that revolutionary culture. "
https://medium.com/@DevynSpringer/cultural-worker-not-a-creative-4695ae8bfd2d
