Research Catalogue

Design for a new house, scrapped 2002, reworked 2021 with bird observatories on mud landscape. Flipping the initial scaled sketches for the house, I selected the naturally lit staircase as the main sculptural and building element for bird observatories, spread on the mud landscape of a natural bird habitat. The sculptural structures are proposed to be installed on site following the parallactic model, which re-frames the site as the medium through the pieces.

Unrealised design for garden house in North London, 2002. An unrealised house commission prompted my preoccupation with the question of creative value, which for architecture largely relates to the local economy. Similar to, but not quite the same as authorial or intellectual property rights, the question of creative value for writers is not connected to local economies, although it is determined to a certain degree by cultural values.

Design, 1995-96, 2023. Design, 1996-97. Photography, 2010, 2011. Essay, 2015. Collage Text, 2022. The exposition serves as commentary and guide on the place of art, in a gradually environmentally and technologically challenged world. The re-design proposal, inspired by De Stijl, illustrates the modernist historical view that art appears to be regressive, rather than progressive: as soon as a movement or a school becomes established, reaching its culmination, it starts declining. Finally, I have included a graduate school architectural design project in the archaeological site of Eleusis accompanied by new commentary. With essay about experimental film making in the British avant-garde, published in "Architecture and Culture" journal, 2015. About how to navigate this exposition: Scroll from top to bottom, then from bottom to top, then scroll to the top right, then scroll to the bottom right.

What is the sound of disability? What is the sound of a body that defies and resists normative standards? And further, is disability an instrument and, ultimately, virtuosity itself? For me, these have been everlasting questions. I acquired a disability at the age of seven from a car accident that impaired my left hand. Following the accident, I transitioned from various musical instruments to find one I could adapt to. More recently, this has led to engaging with various music technologies that fit my body. Specifically, I am searching for an instrument that fits rather than resists my body and signals my disability as an asset rather than a deficit in searching for my own virtuosity. Therefore, this article details my interest in reimagining virtuosity through the intersection of disability and digital music technology. I will describe my experience with the MUGIC gestural device (developed by Mari Kimura) and preliminary results from experimenting with the MUGIC. I will include background on the crux of virtuosity and the usefulness of mapping for reimagining virtuosity, as well as musical results and concluding thoughts regarding virtuosity, music technology, and disability. Lastly, I will argue that “cripping” virtuosity involves a widening understanding of what virtuosity can signify, realize, and magnify, cultivating what is curious, authentic, and at the core of art-making -- a fundamental self-expression beyond comparison and not easily replicated and a virtuosity true to oneself.

In this thesis, having introduced my research questions, in Chapter 2 I present a layered analysis of the important contexts of my practice—walking, sound, walking poetry, and place. In Chapter 3 I present and discuss three works that together explore how it is that I know the world as a sensate embodied walker. In Chapter 4 I develop what I came to call replicated walks—walks made more than once in the same place. Begun in order to re-configure time, they also led me to extend my consideration of place beyond that defined by geography, to place defined by biological phenomena or socio-cultural coherence. In Chapter 5 I describe my emerging ideas of human-scale of place and my underlying ideas of island-ness. Initially I worked on real islands, walking circumferential routes and those defined by chance procedures. From this I developed an imaginary island in the foothills of Northumberland’s Cheviot Hills; made from the human-scale of my embodied walking this led to my creation of an imaginary pandemic island of containment, created in a city, in my locale, made, and made real, by the traces of my embodied walking. Together my works constitute a body of work that represents a contribution to knowledge with specific contributions of: the use of Replicated Walks as a method of experimenting with time and place; Walking Words – the presentation of poetic text in forms (concertina-fold books, scripta continua, scrolls) that requires walking to engage with it, and that also function as metonyms for my original walking act; Walking Islands –the use of human-scale walking to imagine an island into existence, and then invoke the island as a lens through which to continue to pursue the idea. My work also contributes knowledge to the methods of how to record the sounds of the world whilst walking through it, over extended distances and time.

Research exposition of Sanne Bakker, as part of her master at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. This research started with the aim of creating a better theoretical understanding and breaking down the creation process regarding the making of performances with lights. Ultimately, it became a reflection on the performative practice of a classical musician and the interdisciplinary collaboration while making an audiovisual performance. In particular, the process of the visualization of music. Through literary research into interdisciplinarity, audiovisual performances (specifically with classical music), and by doing a musical and narrative analysis through a case study of Paul Hindemith’s Sonate für Harfe, a theoretical framework is created for collaborative preparation with a visual artist and live experimentation. This research then shows the working process and the experiments that were conducted. It concludes with a reflection on the collaboration, the final product, and how playing the harp sonata in this audiovisual setting has affected the performance of the music.