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Artworks

Making Believe, 2024

Test pieces for AV series incorporating cut up, manipulated and reassembled spoken word readings of books by Clara Barton, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud and Henrietta Marshall plus texts from Xhi Ndubisi and Jo Manby's Passing Cloud series. Collaged and edited archive film exploring authorship, obsolescence and illusion in the information age.

That Sinking Feeling, 2018

With ARM. Installation, film, sound and sculpture.

‘Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object to pass through our solar system, moves past the earth, cold to the existential crisis facing the planet’s inhabitants. The scout from afar is strange, as are we. In fact, as we race to understand more, we become even stranger, and so do the objects and phenomena we encounter. The search for understanding and technological advancement has led to what many consider to be a new epoch in the history of the Earth—the Anthropocene. That Sinking Feeling seeks to reflect our current predicament, the artefacts we create in our pursuit of progress, imagined futures (that may or may not contain us) and the complex emotional states we find ourselves in. ARM is a UK-based, cross-disciplinary arts practice comprising Navid Asghari, David Rogerson and James Moss.

Speechless, 2013-2023

Oil, acrylic, ink, dye, pigment, lacquer, salt, sand and sugar on canvas. Layered paintings created over 10 years including through periods of exposure to rain, snow and sun. Each new image obscures preceding compositions while retaining vestiges of earlier forms.

Botanical Magic, 2019

with Deiniol Williams and Lindsey Loughtman

Grid of backlit antique glass magic lantern slides from Manchester Museum, revealing the colonial and extractive histories embedded in its botanical collections. The images show seeds, cells, zoophytes, landscapes, diatoms, cotton production, teaching models, and real and artificial plants including cocoa beans, breadfruit, water lilies, palms and ferns.

Second Nature, 2019

with Navid Asghari

Studies have shown that not only do nature sounds (birdsong, trickling water) induce positive brain activity and reduce stress, but artificial, simulated nature sounds also have beneficial effects. For Second Nature: What is “nature” anyway?, we built a grotto of synthetic plants where speakers played real-life and synthesized nature sounds created by composer Navid Asghari. Re-introducing sounds previously absent from the city-centre venue, this installation invited visitors to consider authenticity and artificiality and what we mean by “natural/unnatural”. The real-life audio included recordings from Rae Story’s Breathing Spaces project with TLC Saint Luke’s, which maps Manchester’s tranquil spaces for people experiencing mental health problems and emotional distress.

Oozy, 2020

As ARM, with Navid Asghari and David Rogerson. Three channel film and sound installation and performance with references to the histories of theatre, literature and cinema. The piece is concerned with what it feels like to be living through a period of intensifying alienation, and the tangled emotional states we find ourselves in. Staged at The Holden Gallery. Curated by Zoe Watson.

Untied States, text, 2014

50 entries from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, software-translated five times to create space for rethinking the vocabulary around psychology, mental health and emotional distress. A new version of Untied States formed the basis of a group project with 50 contemporary artists, each paired with one entry, in The Portico Library’s 2020 exhibition, Talking Sense: The changing vocabulary of mind and brain.

The British Psychological Society said of the DSM: “the general public are negatively affected by the continued and continuous medicalisation of their natural and normal responses to their experiences; responses which undoubtedly have distressing consequences… but which do not reflect illnesses so much as normal individual variation”.