News

I’m thrilled to be co-curating A Festival of Feminist Architectural Writing alongside the wonderful Jane Rendell, Polly Gould, Helene Frichot, and Emma Cheatle. The festival is on 1 May 2024, at the Bartlett School of Architecture, hosted by MA Situated Practice.

The day includes over 20 readings of site-writing alumna/alumni, and two evening book launches (Lilian Chee’s Architecture and Affect, and Frichot and Cheatle’s co-edited special issue of the Journal of Architecture on influential architectural theorist and practitioner Jennifer Bloomer). 

This is a free event, but please do book and come along if you are in London that day. 

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/events/2024/may/festival-feminist-architectural-writing-rearrangements-and-revisitation

Stockport is the Town of Culture in 2024 and to celebrate this, five writers have been commissioned to produce a new piece of work each inspired by Stockport. 

The writers are myself, Sarah-Clare Conlon, David Gaffney, Joe Stretch, and Emily Yates.

Expect prose and poetry on a variety of themes – rivers, hats, music, low flying planes, suburbia and many more Stockport infused topics. 

The work will be performed live at the following venues.

Rare Mags, Underbanks, at 6.30 pm on Thursday 11 April

Mura Ma Gallery, Marple, at 6.30 pm on Saturday 20 April

Both events are free – book for Rare Mags here Tickets For Stockport Stories – 11/04 – Rare Mags

and just turn up to Mura Ma. There will be words to enjoy, wine to drink, and books and magazines and art and more to buy! We look forward to seeing you in Stockport!

I’m excited to be working with Manchester City of Literature on a new project called Stories of Gorton.

We are looking for people who know and love Gorton to work on a new project, exploring and sharing Gorton’s stories. We are recruiting six, paid ‘investigators’ to meet once a month over five months. We will explore Gorton by walking its streets and sharing the stories we know and the ones we discover along the way. In the final session we will look at how we might grow the project, to share and collect stories more widely. 

The sessions will run 10.00-12.00 on the 2^nd Saturday of the month from September 2022 through to January 2023. Each session will involve an hour long walk (rain or shine!) followed by an hour at Gorton Library having a cuppa and a chat (and maybe doing some writing). Investigators will be paid £50 per session and need to be able to commit to at least four out of the five dates.

For more detail of how to apply see our call for applications below.

I am excited to announce the publicationof Manchester: Something Rich and Strange, edited by myself and Paul Dobraszczyk.

What is Manchester? Moving far from the glitzy shopping districts and architectural showpieces, away from cool city-centre living and modish cultural centres, this book shows us the unheralded, under-appreciated and overlooked parts of Greater Manchester in which the majority of Mancunians live, work and play. Continue reading →

I spoke at a fascinating event hosted by Methods Lab + Critical Ecologies Group at Goldsmiths, University of London on 20 October 2020. The event responded to an inter disciplinary site-specific collaboration by Nirmal Puwar, Adele Mary Reed and Paul Chokran, mourning trees cut down to make way for new buildings at Coventry University.

The event is now available online: https://criticalecologies.gold.ac.uk/resources

During the first lockdown, March-May 2020, the Whatsapp group for the street I live on in Manchester was flooded with offers of support and solidarity. It has always been a friendly, kind street, but this year I have found myself particularly grateful for my neighbours.

I decided to collect stories about the street to recognise and celebrate what community means and does in difficult times.

The result is an online book of stories, plus a collection of handmade books exploring themes of history, nature and neighbourliness.

You can read the online book on ISSUU

I will be speaking as part of the event. Brutalist Architectures: mourning, mapping, mobilising, organised by Methods Lab + Critical Ecologies Group Goldsmiths, on Tuesday 20th October, 5-7pm. Please register to receive the link.

Date: Saturday 16th May 2020, 18:30

Location: Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82975137128

At the beginning of May, Peoples’ Bureau (Eva Sajovic and Rebecca Davies), along with writer Sarah Butler and film maker Shona Hamilton put out a call for artists to respond to the questions

· What is the role of the artist in today’s political, economic and social context?

· What is home?

· What might the future of living look like?

We are using funding from the AHRC best early career film award, given to our latest preojct, UnEarthing Elephant, a film exploring and celebrating the value of the much maligned Elephant and Castle shopping centre, to support this initiative.

Please join the successful artists, Nicola Privato, Julene Robinson, Ryan Skelton, Luzmira Zerpa and Omar Rocha, and Katrina Wilde to share the outcomes of their at-home-artist-residencies. A rich mix of music, poetry, performance and visual art. The works will be punctuated by work from Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. You are invited to join us on zoom at 18:30. We look forward to seeing you there.

Please note that the performance will be recorded and turned into a moving image art piece for exhibition purposes at a later point. Please mute your audio and turn on speaker view.

You can choose to switch your video on or off. If you do not want to be identified please change your name.

Artist Katrina Wilde will be delivering a durational performance/workshop during the performance. If you would like to take part please prepare:

· A needle

· Some thread

· Something that needs mending that you’ve been putting off doing

Continuing the collaborative approach we used to create Unearthing Elephant (winner of the 2017 AHRC Early Career Film Award), I along with Eva Sajovic, Rebecca Davies and Shona Hamilton are launching a call for five mini at-home-artist-residencies during lockdown.

Deadline: 12.00  Friday 1st May

Fee: £400

Please download the full call information here: this_is_a_call

I’m very excited to be talking about More Than 100 Stories with the brilliant Nicole Mollett as part of a new series of public events organised by the new Centre for Place Writing at MMU.

Join us for an in-conversation event discussing the rewards, and challenges, of: collaboration across art forms; working at the intersection of research and creative practice; making work in direct response to specific people, places and events, and much more.

The event is free and you can register your place on EventBrite.