Currently I am looking at one of my long term interests the creation of adventure playgrounds. In particular the playgrounds that were created and built by children out of the materials they found in the destruction and dereliction of WWII. These acts of building and playing started the adventure playground movement, allowing children to take risks and create their own environments. Through this project I want to encourage audiences to take risks by building their own play spaces, giving chances for people to imagine alternative futures together. 

Previously was one of the lead artists on Good Game, which used games as a positive way to explore our lives, communities and the places where we live. I started to create a community games toolkit to get people connected, disrupting and playing in public space, and to create their own bespoke games to explore their area. I have recently taken part of this toolkit and created a play pavilion, the Games Generator. This festival piece allows audiences to create their own street game in a few minutes. The games created over the summer will be shared as a resource for others to play and explore their parks. This has toured to parks festivals across the country including Forest of Imagination, Bath, Make My Day, Morecambe Bay and Love Parks Week, Manchester; and continues to be selected for festivals and schools workshops. It was also R&D during Left Coast’s Third Room Residency, as well as being researched and selected for the Social Art Summit, Sheffield and the Artist Jamboree, Devon. This led me to set up a Social Art Network group in Manchester. 

I was part of the Creative 50 programme with Manchester International Festival, 2016 where I created ‘Bitcoins for Bags’ - an advert from the future, and created ‘What if Teenage Girls Ruled the World’, a manifesto with a group of young women and one trans young man, about what they wanted their future world to be like. I have been selected and invited to a range of future world-building workshops including Future Everything’s Creative Lab, looking at new ways to design the future which is feeding into my current playgrounds project.

I often use technology as part of my work as artist duo One Five West with artist Sophie Bullock. One Five West are interested in how we can use art and technology to connect with citizens and instigate dialogue around our environment; how can communities be a part of future cities, and what might that look like? We actively create work that can be a facilitator in social change.  

Last year we created a large scale interactive installation for Chester Zoo exploring their conservation projects. In 2016 we were selected for the Arts+Tech creative practice accelerator, one of three £1m national pilots, set up by Arts Council England and Innovate UK. During this programme we created portable play objects called ‘Larks; which have subsequently been showcased at ‘WARP Festival’, The Whitworth, ‘Hello Shenzhen’, the V&A and ‘DigiLabs’, University of Manchester. This later lead to us receiving further funding from Innovate UK to deliver a innovation project creating new hardware, TARA, for artists and community workers and creating an interactive arts trail. During this time we were also selected for ‘New Talent Residency’ at Pervasive Media Studio where we created a series of works ‘Things that say no’, which looked at subverting hostile architecture and raising design questions around who the city is for and how it is designed. You can read about our experiances in our blogs on this page. Previous works also include ‘Code and Carpentry’, a light and sound playground where audiences played and created their own sounds and visuals. We are also currently part of Mufti Game’s team that is developing Ferguson Gang - a work exploring the housing crisis through games. 

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