I am a British-born artist who has been living in New Zealand since the end of 1999.
Since graduating from a Contemporary Arts degree course in the late 90’s , I have been making creative work of all kinds, including installation, performance, video, photographs and interactive projects. I have exhibited artwork in places as far afield as the UK, New Zealand, Poland, Spain and Greece.
Over the past decade, my own art practice has taken a back seat to freelance graphic design, web design and writing for education. As well as commercial design projects, I have also worked as a technical collaborator with artists including Miranda Brown and Chiara Corbeletto.
In web design I work at the front end – sometimes I do the visual design and sometimes I work with other designers and user experience people; I write HTML and CSS markup and am really keen on web standards, efficient code and good usability. I often work with WordPress as a CMS to create sites the owners can keep up to date.
I have also worked extensively in the tertiary education sector in the art and design field, through teaching, course design, and curriculum writing.
I’m pretty passionate about all creative areas; in my spare time I play with AKSamba – a massed percussion band, and was formerly one of 5 percussionists with Batucada Sound Machine. I also form one part of a 5-part acappella group called Treblemakers. We arrange and sing popular songs, from the slightly folky Leisure Society to the blatantly commercial Beyoncé and everything in between. Sometime we play ukulele too. I have also been known to play French Horn with Brassouls and Labrophonic (both Kingsley Melhuish creations).
I also LOVE cinema, and have a particular fascination for documentary films. I’m looking forward to the Documentary Edge festival.
I am also keen on growing my own food, and for a while I kept a blog keeping track of what I did in the garden.
My brain copes well with languages, it seems. Years of learning French at school left me with a deeply ingrained understanding of the language which manifests as ‘managing to communicate quite well’ when the need arises. I learned Spanish as an adult and spent a few extended periods of time in Spain, which has left me with pretty good comprehension. I also studied Te Reo Māori for two years at Te Wānanga O Aotearoa. Their teaching method was accelerated learning, which was amazing for making the words and concepts get in and stay there. Though it has been a while since I finished the course, I still feel as though I could give a pretty reasonable mihi.