I set out to investigate how my body’s dimensions, capabilities and senses can generate form. My determined plans quieten when I get into a tactile conversation with a material whose characteristics surprise me. It silently redirects my actions but I test back, manipulating it toward the will of my mind’s eye. Then a form I could never have foreseen can gradually condense into creature-like independence. 

I live and work in the Cairo neighbourhood of Faggala. I’m working towards a collaborative residency in London and a solo show in Cairo, both planned for 2023.

Sometimes I write about making sculpture and what is happening around me while I go about it.

I wrote Nine Wobbly Yellow Grave Attendants to explore a strange train of thought that I had one night in the studio. It started when I imagined the Nine poised on their stands alongside the human witnesses to various possible scenarios of my own burial. The text was included in From the light, to the night, a book of artists’ writings published by Aber Press in 2021.

When Connor Endt wrote to ask me about the leather and clay sculpture, Dabs, I told him how I made it while learning how babies grab, chew and stare their way towards comprehending ‘object permanence’ - the apparent stability of the material world. Our conversation accompanied images of Dabs in the book Objekt-permanenz-objekte, edited by Fabien Schneiker.

My text Some stories of our swallows was included in the Adaption, Retelling, the eighth addition of Soanyway, an independent online magazine edited by Derek Horton and Gertrude Gibbons.

The letters I wrote to Pangaea Sculptors’ Centre after my first eight months in Egypt were featured in PSC’s Industry of Sculpture interview series in 2018.

My experiences as a teacher and carer importantly inform my creative work.

While making things with - or just being with - adults with learning disabilities, I learn about how people enact their will according to the muddle of body, imagination, love, fear and language that we each uniquely are.

In 2019 I led a paper sculpture workshop as part of the Winter Academy, a six-week program for adults at Fayoum Art Center, where I was then a resident artist. It was an exhilarating challenge to respond to the students’ ambitious curiosity as they investigated the methods I introduced them to.

In 2018 I was part of Michael Beutler’s team while he created “Råby Planet” a public art festival for the Swedish town of Råby. The ‘planet’ was a huge 5 metre ball that was rolled around laps of the local forest by teams of local people. This concluded a summer of communal workshop activities where I saw new companionable connections form and strengthen between people of disparate ages and origins. I spent most of that year in Berlin, assisting Michael and the Swedish artist Nina Cannell. The Swedish arts grants committee IASPIS had awarded me their Assistant Stipendium soon after my Masters at Malmö Art Academy.

I am continually intrigued and challenged by the way communicating and making intertwine. When using my fledgling Arabic to learn from weavers in Harrania, potters in Nazla or woodturners in Faggala, I am in every way a beginner. Then I return to the privacy of my studio to slowly work out my own way.

Born 1987 (Somerset, UK)

EDUCATION

2015-2017 Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts Malmö Art Academy, Malmö, Sweden
2006-2009 Bachelor of Arts (Sculpture) with First Class Honours Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts, London
2005-2006 Foundation in Art and Design with Distinction Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London

I have exhibited in the UK, Sweden and Germany.