PUBLIC ART PROJECTS
Didcot Garden Town, 2022
This community art project involved working with local youth groups Didcot Train and Abingdon Damascus Youth Project to teach photographic skills to local young people as part of the Didcot Garden Town initiative. The resulting images were collated into a series of boards, including a visual quiz to challenge passersby to name as many flowers and plants as possible - or to learn to recognise more species - and are displayed at large scale on hoarding on The Broadway, Didcot's main thoroughfare, while building work is in progress. Along with gaining new skills, experience in nature and an appreciation for the natural world around them, the young people took great pride in seeing their work publicly on display.
Oxford Human Rights Festival, 2022
A series of installations to highlight the Human Right to Education and to stand in solidarity with the challenges of the unprecedented numbers of displaced people around the world, this murmuration of hundreds of origami butterflies was created by the HipHat Collective in collaboration with the local community and Oxford Brookes students and librarians. Made from discarded books, the butterflies fly through the Oxfordshire County Library.
HipHat Collective, a group of Oxford Brookes Master of Fine Arts students: Alamelu Annamalai, Etain O’Carroll, Kulsuma Monica Khatoon, Laura Campbell, Lilli Tranborg and Maria Won.
Art in Crisis, Oxford, 2017
In 2017, Crisis, the national charity for homeless people, marked its 50th year with a photographic project which took place across its 11 Skylight centres in the UK.
In Oxford, I worked with Crisis members to create a public exhibition of their photographs under the theme of 'What If' which examined their experiences of homelessness, their past, present and future. The project took place over 11 weeks with weekly classes on photographic techniques in order to provide the Crisis members with the skills to illustrate their ideas. The images were then printed in large format and displayed on hoarding around the site of the new Westgate shopping centre
Loughegar, Ireland, 2011
This aim of this project was to create a visually engaging artwork for the foyer of a new primary school in rural Ireland. The project began as a series of photographic workshops for staff and students who learned practical skills and created a series of over 1,000 digital images which were then used to create a photo mosaic.
The collaborative nature of the project meant that staff, students and the local community got actively involved in the creation of the artwork. The final mosaic and additional timeline that became a by-product of the project reflect the history, environment and local character of the immediate area.
Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford, 2007
This public art project was aimed at improving the visual effect in the two main corridors of the new hospital wing through the installation of a series of large-scale abstract photographic images printed and mounted on aluminium.
The exact nature of the images was determined by conversations with staff and patients, offering hospital users a chance to be involved in the creation of the artwork, anchoring it in its surroundings. The images took everyday recollections and elevated them to a permanent visual display to evoke the intrinsic value that is often not recognised in the rush of daily life.
Poetry Illustration, 2004
In collaboration with local writers' groups working on Haiku poetry (a Japanese form of poem written with 17 syllables in three lines of five, seven and five) we created a book of postcards featuring their work illustrated with my photographs. Brass plaques were then installed in rural locations close to where they were written for them to be 'found' in situ.