I hold sensory story-telling sessions in settings including hospitals, community centres, schools, galleries, for groups of all ages. These are focused on story-telling through: drawing, writing, movement, film, sensory tasks, everyday sensory materials, other art forms relevant to the group. We use these different media as ways to create, imagine, dream together.
Settings I work with/have worked with long-term include: Heron Academy, Great Ormond Street Hospital, South London Gallery, Tuke School, John Chilton School, Morden Library. I have also worked in many other spaces including: London Metropolitan University, Regent’s Park Time Bank, Royal College of Art, University of East London, St. George’s Hospital. Between 2014 and 2020 I ran sessions in local community settings – Lantern Arts Centre, Wimbledon Library, Holy Trinity Church, William Morris House.
The work I do is strongly inspired by and connected to work by other artists, theorists and activists. These are usually within the areas of sound, performance art, liberatory pedagogies, disability justice and play, including: bell hooks, Mia Mingus, Paolo Freire, Stuart Lester, Tehching Hsieh, Pauline Oliveros, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, Marginal Consort, Trisha Brown, Alice Wong, Lama Rod Owens, Joanna Grace, Stefanie Kaufman, Judith Butler.
Series commissioned by Merton Libraries (2023-2025) focusing on real-life storytelling: imagining and dreaming generous, embodied structures to hold us in our lives. What do we want for our collective futures?With young people and staff at Heron Academy I co-created a film about a cloud that comes to visit the school. The cloud floats up and down, around and around, until… we are in the cloud. Film coming in February 2024.Students in Years 12-13 at John Chilton Special Community School asked what would happen if the school got taken over by an evil doll. When this happens one day, after an argument in the playground, everything falls apart: the classrooms, the corridors, the hall…and even the staff. And then what happens? How do we get through this unravelling together? Screened at John Chilton School Assembly on 31 March 2022.Lost in the Maze was created by students in Years 9-11 at John Chilton. One day, when P4 Violet are minding their own business, some yellow string appears. They follow the string to see where it goes. The string helps lead them along, and then… it gets tangled. P4 Violet asks, what if you got lost in your everyday spaces? What if you got tangled? What if you couldn’t get free? Lost in the Maze will be screened publicly in 2024.Cardboard Mazes 1-3, January – March 2022, Mitcham Lane Baptist Church. Sensory work with GOSH Play Team on Zoom during the lockdowns, 2020-2021. When we were very new to Zoom, it was about understanding how we sense together in this medium where we can’t touch each other, how can we still create and tell stories together. With a group of 6-11 year olds in Merton, we co-produced a book of stories in Summer 2018. Using the theme of Space, we dreamed and imagined together.In weekend and holiday community sessions in 2018-2019 we co-wrote scripts which we produced into short plays that we made puppets and settings for. I ran a puppet club at The Study Prep during this time too and co-created a puppet show there with students. We performed all the puppet shows to students’ adults/carers/parents. Stories include: King Shark, Zoo Taken Over by Monsters, Monster Play. In a festival in 2018 for a three day project called ‘Build an Imaginary World’ we collected waste, recycling materials each morning from the festival, and then built them into a communal imaginary world. These materials were a starting point for story-telling, community-building, embodied making. Under the Sea, 2018Under the Sea, 2018Under the Sea, 2018Particularly in a hospital context, I’ve sometimes translated this to create a world in a box – a world with all the child’s likes and dislikes. I’ve seen that this can be a good starting point for some children, as it makes clear that the session is all about them – their likes / dislikes – their experience. We have often created comics, stories, other artwork responses to these worlds.
sensoryarts.co.uk 