The year so far

Work in progress for inclusion in The Future Present | 2026

January didn't get off to a good start when I heard that an application I'd made with another artist to be part of the Freelands Foundation's Two Together studio programme had failed. We felt we had a strong application, but we didn't even get to interview.

The thought of spending a month in a large, purpose-built studio space (as opposed to my kitchen table, a muddy field or a windy beach) was a wonderful thing to contemplate. But, as with so many opportunities advertised at the moment, the competition (for even a modest fee) was impossibly intense. The cursory rejection, after so much shared effort on our part, made me look at two other proposals I was drafting and almost give up.

Now I'm left with an even sharper awareness of my lack of a permanent studio - one of the factors that is driving me towards moving image practice. Digital video and sound can be planned at home, made on location, edited at a desk and stored on a drive. But, in parallel, I would still like to be able to let "my fingers do the thinking" as my fellow artist Stella Tripp puts it, and that means a dedicated space, even if it's just a table at home that's used for nothing else. It's led me to consider permanent rental of offsite storage to clear some space in my house. It feels counter-intuitive to rent commercial storage rather than a studio, but this kind of space is far more readily available in Exeter, and in some cases actually cheaper.

In better news, I'm looking forward to the inaugural cinema screening of my new film The Porous Body at Two Short Nights in March.  I'm also cooking up plans with Frankie Williams to take on the 48 Hour Film Challenge - writing, shooting and editing a three-minute film to a brief that won't be known until the 48-hour countdown begins. In the meantime we've been checking tech, scouting locations and gathering props, costumes and potential extras.

More good news is that a piece I wrote on class and its impact on my art career has been accepted by Axis for a forthcoming publication. This was so difficult to talk about that I resorted to metaphor and now feel I bottled out - especially when I heard Sarah Ryder talk (see below).  But I really think it's something we need to acknowledge, so I don't regret having a go. (See a previous attempt here.)

I've also made 200 tiny packets of seeds and shipped them off to Nick Davies at Loophole Projects for inclusion in a forthcoming publication The Future Present. 

And despite a strong urge to hibernate, I've made an effort to be out and about at film screenings and various artists talks and meetings.  I truly believe one of the best individual actions we can take in the current geopolitical climate is to stay connected and look out for each other. Today's outing was to see Sarah Ryder closing her fabulous show Multiferals at Exeter Phoenix with a fascinating talk that underlined how limitations (of class, space, time etc) need not hold us back. Far better to work right up to and bounce hard against them: resourcefulness can have amazing results.

 

Official Selection - Two Short Nights

                                 

What a great way to end the year: hearing that my moving image work - The Porous Body - has been selected for the Two Short Nights Film Festival , which takes place 5th-6th March next year.  

This experimental short explores the dark and claustrophobic world of the late 19th / early 20th century seance room -- from the point of view of a female medium. It is based on first-hand accounts by believers, sceptics and scientists.

Mediums aroused curiosity and suspicion in equal amounts. Often treated like scientific specimens, they were subjected to intrusive examinations and troubling experiments in order to demonstrate their integrity.

It's a tangled story of faith and rationality, the limited power that women held in a highly patriarchal society, and the Victorian obsession with pushing at the frontiers of scientific discovery.

The film's low-tech, low-budget aesthetic reflects the simple means by which these women conjured their manifestations of ectoplasm and other phenomena -- as well as the still-evolving technology that was used to record and comprehend them.

Gathering and sowing (the seeds of a work)

RANGE | Work in progress | 2025

 

Making work about Exeter's golf driving range has been on my mind for a while. I finally began to grip the subject properly when, with some fellow artists, I began to investigate the history and geography of our locality. I realised my council allotment was on the edge of the former Corporation Brickworks (and later landfill site) and that the driving range was built on top of those brickworks. 

I then started a wonderful online course at UCL run by Bella Riza: Worlds Upon Words: Unlocking Emotion Through Film which I'm using to help me find the shape of this project.

I think it's probably about precarity - environmental precarity, of course: how we are balanced on the edge of catastrophe. But in a more day-to-day sense, about my allotment, one of just 12 precariously perched above the contaminated land below. And how I use nurturing the soil, making room for wildlife, and growing my own food as a way of shoring up belief in a better future, even as more and more of my plot falls away into the brickfield (and I am showered with misfired golfballs).

In my allotment, I'm devoting some space to Exeter's broad bean flock. It's a community growing project, now in its second year, coordinated by Exeter Seed Bank. In gardens and allotments across the city, we're encouraging our different varieties of beans to cross-pollinate wildly to create a broad bean uniquely adapted to Exeter's soil and climate. It's been described as a living seed bank, complementary to static seed banks such as Svalbard Global Seed Vault. So, I suppose, another way of accessing hope and building resilience.

Which leads me on to my contribution to a forthcoming artists' book by Nick Davies The Future Present, for which I'll also be referencing seed banks as a message to the future. I've touched on them before in Mutter Erde, but more of that (and Foreign Soil) in a future post. 

Gorse Cone at the Dorset Open

Gorse Cone, a short film made at Durlston Country Park in Dorset by me and Megan Calver is currently being shown at the inaugural Dorset Open. The exhibition features artists working in diverse media, all with a focus on the region’s landscape, people, history and culture.  

The Dorset Open runs 18 October to 30 November 2025 at the Dorset Museum & Art Gallery, High West Street, Dorchester DT1 1XA

Check gallery website for opening times and ticket prices. 

The Porous Body

Still from The Porous Body | Moving image - work in progress

I'm currently editing a simple four-minute DIY film called The Porous Body. It's the first iteration of a larger moving image project about female mediums in the late 19th and early 20th century.

This first film focuses on materialising mediums (ie those that summoned physical materials, voices and objects to the seance room) and their brush with science. It's a tangled story of faith and rationality, the limited power that women held in a highly patriarchal society, and the obsession of the Victorians with pushing at the frontiers of scientific discovery.

Investigations into these women are well documented* (though the opinions and feelings of the women themselves are rarely noted). All available technologies (eg flash photography, wax cylinder recordings, microscopes) were deployed in an attempt to capture, measure and analyse their powers. Often treated like scientific specimens, they were subjected to intrusive examinations and troubling experiments in order to demonstrate their integrity. It's true, some of their manifestations of ectoplasmic matter do look a lot like cut paper and wet muslin, but many people who witnessed their activities first-hand found them compelling.

*I've based my work on accounts of investigations into mediums published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, the Quarterly Transactions of the British College of Psychic Science and the Phenomena of Materialisation: a contribution to the investigation of mediumistic teleplastics by Albert von Schrenk-Notzing.

Where are we now?

Night Piece | 2025 | Postcard with image and score

“Cutting across a field on a moonless night, we encountered familiar trees as strange new beings. Caught in the flash of our camera, the full force of each tree's unique personhood came to light. The trees seemed as surprised as we were: uprooted from our separate worlds, we found ourselves swimming in the darkness together.”

Megan Calver and I are pleased to present Night Piece (Swimming with Trees) at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery. It's a set of three digital photographs and a take-away artists' multiple (postcards).

Where Are We Now? is a group exhibition by artists belonging to CAMP CIC (Contemporary Art Membership Platform). Considering contemporary environmental issues from multiple perspectives, the exhibition features 40 artists from across Devon and Cornwall including:

Dana Aala, Ruth Bateman, Lottie Bolster, Sara Bor, Katrina Brown, Bob Budd, Megan Calver and Gabrielle Hoad, Erika Cann, Emily Chung, Caroline Collingridge, Gillian Cooper, Rachael Coward, Laura Denning, Marko Dutka, Francesca Elliott, John Elliott, Ilya Fisher, Sue Green, Angela Hilton, Karen Howse, Tim Hutton, Christina (Tina) Kutter, Octavia Madden, Gill Melling, Elizabeth Orcutt, Olivia Parsons, Ann Russell, Janet Sainsbury, Penny Simons, Mike Snudden, Viv Spencer, Charlotte Squire, Frances Staniforth, Stella Tripp, Carol Weir, Emma Saffy Wilson, Patricia Wilson Smith, Claire Winfield and Melanie Young. 

Where are we now? runs 6 September 2025 to 25 October 2025 at Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Elmfield House, Dowell Street, Honiton, Devon  EX14 1LX

Stone at theundergroundstream

 

Lark stone | 2016 | Still from digital documentation of live action | 2m 8s of video with sound

 

I'm delighted to be joining Susie David in a show she's curated called Stone.

“Seven artists consider stone in its simplest, rawest form – a rawness that provides oblique allegories: for deep time, for resistance, for nurturing, and for healing.”

Gretchen Faust | Jem Southam | Megan Calver & Gabrielle Hoad | Maxine Foster | Steve Thorpe | Susie David

Megan and I are showing Lark stone that we made with Susie back in 2016 during a collaboration at Dawlish Warren.

The simple gesture of turning a piece of chert in the hand conjures the song of a skylark: the weight and inertness of the stone contrasting with the bird’s energetic movements and song. The stone sings along, squeaking gently as it is handled.

Stone
theundergroundstream
Home Farm, Churchstow TQ7 2QR
By appointment, weekdays 2-5pm until 30 August 2025