About Me

I have recently returned to freelancing full-time as a community artist having worked in the social justice sector for many years and am currently seeking to engage in interesting, high quality community focussed projects that suit my arts practice and provide meaningful engagement with communities. I have worked in the arts sector consistently for the last 18 years, since 2018 I have focussed on delivery of arts at festivals and events around the country.

My background in community arts is extensive and varied. I started my career in youth provision, working with community youth centre in Cumbria to develop creative activities for young people through consultation with the primary stakeholders, the young people in the local area. This led to my designing and delivering a varied programme of regular arts and film making workshops, community events, visits to other projects and arts events and collaborative projects.

At this point I decided to broaden and develop my understanding of community arts through undertaking a masters degree at Carlisle Institute of the Arts, this gave me the opportunity to work and learn with a number of practitioners from across the arts spectrum and explore the history and theory around community arts provision. During my studies I became actively involved in Carlisle Arts festival, providing their first community arts event ‘The Carlisle Smile’ as part of the festival programme.

I have worked with a broad range of organisations and participants, in youth, education, health and community settings. I consistently seek to extend my range of skills and practice knowledge by seeking out projects with new groups of participants, collaborative projects with other artists and opportunities to undertake training and mentorship.

In addition to freelancing I organised a co-operative of community artists ‘the Tribe of Tat’ to provide a children’s area at various music festivals and community events around the country including Kendal Calling, Shambala, Mad Ferret and Solfest.

While working as project leader for Carlisle Eden Mind I had the opportunity to combine my arts practice with my social sector work, co-creating ‘Growing Voices’ a project for Time to Change with a group of diverse individuals with lived experience of mental illness. We toured the Growing Voices project around events in Cumbria for two years, the former CEO of Carlisle Eden Mind described the project as having ‘transformed attitudes towards mental health in Cumbria’

More recently my arts practice has revolved around provision of site art installations and venue décor for a variety of music festivals, I have provided décor for over 30 music venues in various locations from festival fields to city clubs. I enjoy the versatility that festival art provides and the inventiveness generated by these events, I am often actively involved in the build and there is a great deal of satisfaction in participating in it all coming together. Additionally for the last few years I have taken up co-ordinating site art at Solfest, commissioning artists from around the county and managing a team of volunteers to create outdoor installations ranging from dragons made of scrap to live graffiti walls.