4 & 5 October 2024
RENEWAL: 2024 SPE Northwest Regional Conference
​Hood Community College, Gresham, Oregon


I am delighted to share that I have been invited to present at the upcoming RENEWAL: 2024 SPE Northwest Regional Conference in Gresham Oregon on the 4th and 5th October. I will be presenting my paper The Woods: Exploring Place Attachment Through Soil Chromatography. This paper explores how alternative photographic processes, specifically soil chromatography, can be used by artists in new ways to unpick the complexities of place attachment and its relation to the migrant experience. This paper takes an autobiographical approach drawing on examples from my own art practice. I provides the key strategies used in my work to explore themes of home, mapping, ritual, and time. As an immigrant myself I use the light-sensitive soil chromatography process in my body of work The Woods to explore ideas of place attachment I have experienced after living abroad for fifteen years. 

To find out more about the conference please use the link below. 

https://www.spenational.org/conferences/renewal

Women Alternative Photography Group and Folk House Darkroom in partnership are excited to announce the open call for our upcoming symposium The Art of Experimentation: A Symposium on Alternative Photography. This symposium will bring together presentations from contemporary women, non-binary, and trans artists and researchers who are exploring the possibilities of alternative photographic processes. This symposium considers how contemporary practitioners are using innovative and unique approaches to photography to explore the possibilities of light sensitive materials.

Women Alternative Photography Group and Folk House Darkroom invites papers, presentations and practice-based contributions in response to the conference theme The Art of Experimentation. We are calling for applications that explore the role of experimentation and discovery within the creative process. Participants are invited to articulate how they use experimentation within different contexts, in practice, theory, or across different alternative photographic disciplines. In addition, this symposium aims to celebrate and build the community of alternative process photographers.

To find out more information on how to apply please visit the link below. 
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UCA Research Student Conference
University for the Creative Arts Doctoral College, Rochester House, Canterbury
13 June 2024

Last month I was invited to share my PhD research at the UCA Research Student Conference in Canterbury. I chose to speak about my case studies which is research only my advisors have previously seen. It is one of my newer chapters and definitely still needs a lot of work and editing. There is something quite vulnerable and nerve wrecking about presenting new research for the first time. But I find huge value in sharing works in progress and receiving interesting questions and feedback. I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity to learn more about my peers research as well and see the exciting work they are doing.
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I am also incredibly grateful for the wonderfully kind Camille Serisier for taking these photos and for organizing the event along with the rest of the organizing committee. 

Photo credit: Camille Serisier

Over the past three months I have been working on the Revisions research project a collaboration between The Victoria and Albert Museum and Fast Forward: Women in Photography. The project investigates the representation of women photographers within the V&A photography collection.

The V&A photography collection is one of the oldest and most significant photography collections in the world and holds 800,000 photographs.
I have had the pleasure of working with Fiona Rogers the Parasol Foundation Curator of Women in Photography as well as the photography team who have been incredibly generous in welcoming me to the V&A and answering all of my many questions.

As part of this research I had the joy of gathering contextual information about the collection from interviews with Martin Barnes, Marta Weiss, Zorian Clayton, Ella Ravilious, Erika Lederman, Mark Haworth Booth, and Fiona Rogers. I also collected and analysed available data on the collection.

You can now learn more about this project by heading over to the Fast Forward: Women in Photography website.
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https://fastforward.photography/.../revisions-with-va.../

I am honoured to be invited back for the second year to be a Juror for the 'Chase the light ' event this weekend. It is a pleasure to be on the Jury alongside some incredible people working in the Creative Industries including the following:

Richard Renaldi, Artist and Educator 

Julia Dolan, Ph.D., The Minor White Senior Curator of Photography, Portland Art Museum

Kris Graves, Photographer, publisher, and board member At Blue Sky Gallery 

Alanna Edwards, Curator of Art & Education Initiatives at Surrey Art Gallery

Inti St. Clair, Lifestyle photographer represented by Homestead Creatives

Victor Yañez-Lazcano, Artist and Assistant Professor of Photo/Media, Universty of Washington

Erin Spencer, Gallery and Public Programs Coordinator, Photographic Center Northwest

Chase The Light is Photographic Center Northwest’s (PCNW) annual summer fundraising and friend-raising event celebrating photography and community. It kicks off with a 48-hour photo weekend on June 8th and 9th, where people around the globe make photographs on the same weekend. Every participant who submits will have their work reviewed by industry professionals and is guaranteed to have one photograph selected for inclusion in a pop-up exhibition and print sale on June 15th. Gather your creative friends and family and register today!

On the 28 May 2024 the first ever Women Alternative Photography Group Seminar took place in person at the Brewery Tap Gallery UCA Project Space in Folkestone. It was my absolute pleasure to host photographic artists Melanie King and Ky Lewis who shared their art practice and research with us in a series of artist talks. I also shared my research on homesickness followed by a private view of the Homesick exhibition. 

On the 28 May 2024 Homesick opened at the Brewery Tap Gallery UCA Project Space in Folkestone. This solo exhibition showcases the series Homesick where I use the film soup process and hand written letters to investigate homesickness. I worked with ten migrant women from all over the world who selected a liquid that reminded them of a place they have called home. I then took a roll of 35mm colour film and soaked the film in the selected liquid for one hour for every day that it had been since they had returned to their home. This project was created during the COVID-19 pandemic when borders were closed and travel was at a standstill. For many this was the first time they had not be able to travel back home to visit friends and family exacerbating feelings of homesickness.

The exhibition closes tomorrow 1 June 2024. 

On the 20 March 2024 I joined researchers Eiji Yasuhara (University of Kent), Sarah Moody (UCA), and Louise Wigglesworth (University of Kent) on the Place and Space Panel as part of the Post Graduate Humanities Research Salon hosted by the University of Kent. I shared my paper titled Place Attachment and Soil Chromatography which investigated the use of the soil chromatography process in my own artistic practice to visualise the lived experience of place attachment.