Past Projects

Project Name: More Than 100 Stories
Dates: February 2015- September 2016
Place: Across the UK
Partners: A collaboration with visual artist Nicole Mollett, commissioned by the Creative People and Places Network

It never stops, does it? Tick tock, slip and run. All you can do is chase, race, catch it and hold on tight. Except it never stops, does it? Tick tock, slip and run. It leaps and creeps, it marches on and on and all you can do is run to keep up; snatch what you can of it; make sure you’re in the nick of it; try not to let it shimmer through your fingers like so much water. It never stops, does it? Tick tock, slip and run.
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Project Name: Growing | Cooking | Sharing
Dates: December 2014 – December 2015
Place: Breightmet, Bolton
Partners: GUILD HQ and Bolton at Home  – part of the Social Housing Arts Network

I come for lunch and find you have cooked up a feast – enough for ten of me. I can taste your kindness in each dish – rosecoco beans, hot puri, peas. Continue reading →

Project name: Unpicked:Restitched
Date: June 2015-February 2016
Place: Stockport
Partners: Arts and wellbeing charity, Arc, and textile artist, Julie Mosley

Night-time, in this unslept-in town. Skateboarders in the square, repeating themselves across the paving slabs. A handful of drinkers, hunched over quiet pints. A woman grinding her cigarette underfoot. Streetlights cast their yellow haze across empty streets. And in the car park, amongst the concrete pillars and fluorescent lights, the car-mods come, show off their latest trick, admire the tuning of another’s engine, the flash of silver alloys – all that time spent oil-slicked, forehead-scrunched, turned to pure gold.

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Project Name: Stories From The Road
Dates: Spring-Summer 2015
Place: Oxford Road, Manchester
Partners: Cities@Manchester

There are no lines telling you where it starts and where it ends. So let’s draw them in. Two trails of coloured chalk across the tarmac. Here: from park to shops. Here: from library to hotel.

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Project Name: Walking The Edge
Dates: 22-26 June 2015
Place: Didsbury, Manchester
Partners: Didsbury Arts Festival

We know the road is coming – it beats the sound of running water – but it is still an assault, a right-angled twist up into concrete, railings, a different kind of sky. Continue reading →

Project Name: Re/Place
Dates: April-May 2015
Place: Chorlton, Manchester
Partners: Words and Fixtures; Chorlton Arts Festival

Not so much a graveyard, as a tunnel of space in between the green and the pub with a path of gravestones laid from one end to the other. The hard voices of afternoon drinkers nursing pints and fags bleed over the back wall. Birds chirrup and cheep and shit their berry-heavy lunches across the grass and the worn grey stones.

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Project Name: The Feasting Mouth: Writing Residency
Dates: July-August 2014
Place: Skirt of the Black Mouth, Southern Landscape Tate Modern, Sumner Street, London
Partners: Tate Modern, Exyzt

The scaffolding escaped – out the back, through the gaps between the burnt wood, onto this white beach with its strewn rocks and forgotten trees. It was done with the building site – concrete blocks, fluorescent clothes, each kick tipped with steel; dreamt instead of long lunches, meandering conversation, a table on a beach by a street in a city. Continue reading →

Project Name: Digital Affective Histories
Dates: Summer 2014
Place: Glossop
Partners: The Centre For New Writing

Walking between the buildings was like entering a cave: the wind and the day’s noises dampened by stone and brick. Nothing but the hack of crows from the rooftops, the soft cooing of pigeons, the slap of wings as one took off, and the click click of Karen’s heels on the tarmac. Continue reading →

Project Name: Where The Heart Is
Dates: April 2013 – April 2014
Place: Preston
Partners: Age Concern Central Lancashire, CSV

[Scene: Withy Tree Day Centre, I sit next to Brenda at the table]
Brenda: ‘I’ve seen you before.’
Me: Yes, we’ve met, here.
Brenda: Weren’t you with that police man?
Me: No.
Brenda (holds her hand over my forehead): Yes it was you, with that policeman.
Care-worker: There was a woman, who came in with a police officer. You maybe look a bit like her.
Brenda: Is it hard to be in the police?
Me: I’m not in the police.
Brenda: I’ve seen you before.
Me: Well maybe I look like her, that woman. I was on the bus with you a few weeks ago.
Brenda: Yes, you were placing things around the edge, that’s right. I thought so.

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