Tiny Dancer

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Digital Activity (2025)

A drop-in green screen activity where we transform our fingers into fabulous performers! From breakdancing to ballet - tiny costumes, shoes, and our green screens brought finger dancing to life.

Commissioned by Ideas Test. In partnerhsip with Lordswood Community Hub and Lordswood Dancentre, Gather & Groove transformed Lordswood into a vibrant hub of energy and creativity. With a double bed, creative film making, outdoor acrobatics by the beach and a programme of short performances from some awesome young people.

PAST SHOWINGS

Gather & Groove
Lordswood library
17 May 2025

Draw Hope

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Community Project (2023)

Draw Hope is an inspiring collaborative art project that invites participants with lived experience of self-harm or suicide* to create unique, personalised tree mural using their footprints and handprints. Through various creative mediums, including drawing, painting, collage and text, individuals can document their past experiences and future aspirations. The project aims to promote creativity and self-expression, and welcomes participation from all, including remote contributors who can submit their work anonymously.

The Draw Hope project is part of the Kent County Council’s Hope Community Arts Fund, which has supported over 15 different arts projects in the past five years. These projects have shown the positive impact that the arts can have, boosting confidence and providing a safe form of expression for participants.

Completed tree artworks were exhibited at the Turner Contemporary alongside works from other Hope Community Fund projects before embarking on a tour around Kent. This showcase coincides with the Baton of Hope journey, which aims to be the largest suicide awareness and prevention initiative in the UK, fostering necessary conversations and prompting appropriate actions.

Through a series of workshops, participants were guided through the creation of their own personalised tree using their own footprints and handprints and exploring a diverse range of creative techniques and mediums. Footprints form the trunk of their trees, while the branches and leaves take shape through the outlines of their outstretched arms and hands. Each footprint depicts a significant milestone in their lives, symbolising the steps that have brought them to where they stand today. Additionally, the handprints showcase their hopes and dreams for the future.

This project has served as a profound journey of self-reflection, empowering individuals to contemplate their past experiences and the limitless possibilities that lie ahead. Our stories are ongoing, and we continue to grow, with boundless potential awaiting us. Every tree created becomes part of a collective forest, together, they serve as a poignant reminder of the inner journey that each and every one of us embarks upon.

Read Article - A Show of Hope for Kent and Medway
Read Article - The most powerful antidote to despair is hope

This project is a grantee of the ‘Hope’ Community Arts Fund from the Kent & Medway Suicide Prevention Programme.

The HOPE Community Arts Fund has been selected as a winner of the Kent Mental Wellbeing Awards for 2023. More than 220 nominations were received this year from across Kent, Medway, Bexley and Bromley and the judging panel chose this project as one of the 30 winners.

PAST EXHIBITIONS

Launch Event
Turner Contemporary, Margate
Tues 18th Jul 2023

Fremlin Walk, Unit 10, Maidstone
24th – 28th Jul 2023

Chatham Library and community Hub
31st Jul – 4th Aug 2023

Trinity Theatre, Royal Tunbridge Wells
7th –11th Aug 2023

Labour of Love Lost

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Stained Glass (2023)

A stained glass self portrait of the artist enduring a miscarriage. The piece links with and is a continuation of performance piece Natal (Idea in Gestation). This stained glass piece considers the physical endurance and breaking undertaken in the final push of creation. Again using the visual imagery of childbirth, but can refer to all creativity - the anguish and sacrifice experienced in bringing something into being or sometimes failing to.

PAST SHOWINGS

Medway Open Studios
MESS ROOM, Sun Pier House
July 2023

Rerooting

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Stained Glass with Projection Mapping (2022)

This piece uses the tradition of stained-glass-making as its base with the more contemporary techniques of digital animation and projection mapping to add the colour and movement.

PAST SHOWINGS

Medway Open Studios
Mess Room
July 2022

Feeling Animated

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Stop Motion Animations (2022)

Animation project for primary school children looking at our emotions and how we can deal with them. These videos were used as the basis for discussions as well as examples of stop motion animation to accompany practical workshops.

Story and voiceover by Ian Nicholson
Animation by Hannah Whittaker
Funded by Portsmouth City Council, Artswork, Portsmouth Cultural Education Partners and Arts Council England

This Performance Is Unstable

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Experimental Online Performance (2021)

Online meetings bring a new digital chaos to our lives – bad connections, delayed audio, feedback loops and jittery conversations.

This Performance Is Unstable is a work for nine remote singers that both avoids and embraces these glitches, exploiting them to create a new way of collaborating musically over the internet. The experimental score uses technical problems as its chance element and tests the musical possibilities where precise timing is either less important or overcome altogether.

Watch and listen as a changing kaleidoscope of sound is produced, with features of excitement, suspense, resolution and surprise…

This was work was developed in partnership with Andy Millest, who is a music practitioner, musician and composer with over four decades of experience - he’s also my dad. This is our first official collaboration.

This piece was commissioned by Sparked Echo for the Electric Medway festival 2021.

PAST SHOWINGS

Electric Medway Festival
Aug 2021
Online