PROJECTS

A SIDMOUTH MAP

Sidmouth has a rich and eclectic mix of places, spaces, people, groups and events that contribute to its cultural life. Sidmouth School of Art wanted to explore this diversity - to celebrate it, collaborate and explore new opportunities. So in 2022 they commissioned me to conduct community research and create an artwork to represent what I found.

Over 40 conversations fed into the community research and I took inspiration from the work of artists Mark Lombardi’s maps and Edward Tufte's visualisations of data, to make sense of all this information. The result was an abstract artwork produced through a 12-layer screen print process, presenting Sidmouth’s rich and developing art and cultural scene.

Find out more about Sidmouth School of Art and this cultural mapping project

2023

image credits: Sarah Hall

BEYOND THE MAP

Beyond the Map was a project commissioned by Dorset AONB to take a creative and inclusive approach to community engagement in the Char Valley. Beyond The Map builds on the concept of parish mapping, focussing on the process rather than making a specific piece of work. Inspired by Common Ground, the Dorset charity founded in 1983 to seek imaginative ways to engage people with their local environment, the project aimed to create a collective expression of values about how people felt about their local landscape. Common Ground have always placed Local Distinctiveness at the heart of everything they do. They explain this…

“Distinctiveness is about particularity in the buildings and land shapes, the brooks and birds, trees and cheeses, places of worship and pieces of literature. It is about history and nature jostling with each other, layers and fragments, old and new. The ephemeral and invisible are important too: customs, dialects, celebrations, names, recipes, spoken history, myths, legends and symbols”

View The Map

Travel around the collaborative “map” of prints, words, images, stories, sounds. Zoom and move around the map, clicking on place markers to reveal the artworks, videos and more!

Find out more about Common Ground and the original Parish Maps project here.

2021

images below show a preview of the final interactive map, kits that were distributed to local communities, collagraph & monoprints created at Charmouth primary and local village halls

ROUTES

I produced a year-long collaborative nature-based creative project called ROUTES. This brought together Double Elephant Print Workshop and East Devon AONB and a range of artists and printmakers. The programme explored new ways of connecting with nature creatively including printmaking, mapping and literary sound walks.

With school groups from Tipton, Newton Poppleford and Sidmouth, we walked and created linear maps, tried forest bathing, printed with natural materials we found on our walks and devised prompts to leave in the public Creature Nature Boxes in Harpford Woods.

Pebbled Heights, Mossy Depths

As part of the project, artist and writer Ellen Wiles was commissioned to create a literary soundwalk. Listeners can connect with the East Devon landscape, wherever they are.

Reflecting the experience of being on a long walk – sparking memories, thoughts and sensations – this literary soundwalk loosely follows part of the East Devon Way, and moves through a rich variety of landscapes; exploring the nature, landscape, wildlife, and layers of history that make this place unique.

Visit www.ellenwiles.com for listening tips and bonus tracks. You can also download the soundwalk in individual sections.

2021

photo credits: Simon Tutty

24 Days of Print

For Double Elephant Print Workshop’s public engagement programme during Covid-19 lockdown, I produced an advent of daily creative print activities for people to try at home.

Daily video clips of activities for all ages and abilities, using recycled materials and requiring no press were released each day. These included printing wrapping paper with fruit and veg, making a printy GIF, typeset with plasticine, screen printing with tights, festive flickbooks, fabric printing with fish… and much more.

This resource is available at https://www.doubleelephant.org.uk/24daysofprint or #24daysofprint on Instagram

2020

Riddle 57

PRINTMAKING, POETRY & ANIMATION

For Double Elephant Print Workshop’s public engagement programme during Covd-19, I produced a project that brought together poets, historians, animators and printmakers to turn a 1000 year old riddle from the Exeter Book into an animated encounter that can be “played” by the reader.

Riddle 57 is one of the many riddles from the Exeter Book, a tenth-century anthology of poetry in Exeter Cathedral’s library, recognised by UNESCO as one of the world’s principal cultural artefacts. The riddles are playful little windows into the past.

We collaborated with filmmaker Luke Hagan, medievalists Professor Chris Jones (University of St. Andrews), Dr Megan Cavell (University of Birmingham) and poet Jacob Polley, Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University to create a interactive riddle.

We publicised the opportunity online and over 180 prints/ drawings/ paintings from across the world were submitted. The project is one of Exeter City of Literature’s Associated Projects and was featured on the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine

Play the riddle here!

2019

Illustrations for Interstate by Julian Sayarer, Arcadia

I created monotype maps for Julian Sayarer’s award winning travel book, Interstate.

2017

Oxford Baubles

I was commissioned by Oxford University Shops to make a limited edition of lasercut baubles featuring the iconic buildings of Oxford.

2012

The Flicker Club posters

I was commissioned to create posters for the performance cinema night at Stoke Newington Town Hall, The Flicker Club.

A 'boutique' cinema experience, it specialised in showing films adapted from short stories or novels and invited surprise special guests from the worlds of entertainment and literature to read from the source material before showing the film. My posters were for 1951 film of Dickens’ Scrooge and the 1964 version of Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death.

2010 - 12

Various

Other commissions include a range of T-shirts, babygrows, lasercut candleholders and baubles