Surviving a postmemory practice

    This is a post about the effects of working with trauma in a creative practice, and most specifically about using the notion of postmemory to direct research and create output. My project centres on the rupture within my family at the hands of the Franco dictatorship, which in 1939 succeeded in ousting a democratically

What is postmemory?

Here is a short (less than 2 minutes) video with my take on the backbone to my creative practice; the concept of postmemory. First developed to describe the transmitted trauma to the children of holocaust survivors, this term is incredibly meaningful in anchoring my own experience of living with my father’s traumatic lifelong exile from

“trajectory of your bomb through my washing line”

As the debate about bombing Syria has been raging in England we’ve witnessed a decent and honest politician being vilified in many quarters for opposing this action. Polls have shown that the majority of citizens don’t want to bomb Syria and yet somehow this doesn’t count. We are being silenced and a horrendous cycle of

Crossing The Line

Today’s post is a mediation on the line. The line has become a constant motif in my paintings since the introduction of the typewriter ribbon in Exilio 2014 shown in the first image below. During Q & A after a performance of The Sadness of Being Nothing at Bangor University Department of Modern Languages and

Talking Head

To my surprise I made this video today. I was finishing up working through performance ideas when it occurred to me to speak to camera. It had been a productive morning. I decided to strip back my forthcoming performance The Sadness of Being Nothing, to it’s bare essentials as I suddenly saw that it had

Video As Thought

Today I worked through some ideas for a forthcoming performance piece The Sadness of Being Nothing. As I worked I realised deep within me that video making is like blogging and raking my fingers through the sand. Video making has become thinking, and the more I learn (as I make) the more helpful the process

Ode to Shelter

The visual poetics had me quite breathless today at the glorious Abbey at Sutton Coutenay, Oxfordshire. My assemblage, entitled Refuge has survived 11 nights sleeping rough and today in the late Summer sunshine finds echoes in it’s surroundings. What an extraordinarily beautiful place this is. Visit if you can – open 1-5pm until Saturday 3rd October for

Burning Sage

NB This is a blog post which was first published on Barcelona in a Bag, my art blog about the Spanish Civil War.  The refugee crisis is now fully in the public mind. Last week proved decisive in a process of galvanising compassion and propelling large numbers of citizens into action. We marched, made banners,