Contemporary artist making performance work, sound, video and digital artworks.

Socially engaged work and participatory projects are central to my arts practice, and I work both individually and collaboratively as an artist, performer and producer, drawing on over 25 years of professional experience.

My work engages with place, geography and popular culture and often explores human perception and experience in relation to specific places and events, phenomena and nature, and animal-human encounters. Collaboration with people from a diversity of places and communities - often with those who have no experience of being involved in such projects - is embedded into the process of making work through conversation, devising and production.

Based in South West London and Somerset, I also work as part of Biggerhouse, a collective of artists and filmmakers.

To see video works, shorts, documentation of projects and collected moments, go to my youtube site.

Web-based artwork made in 2009 in response to the Neroche landscape on the Blackdown Hills, (uses Flash and sound): Transience

My blog on the making of the project www.suenerocheartwork.blogspot.com

Current work:

The No 1 Bus: A PVA Universal Value and b-side festival commission to work in collaboration with drawing artist and animator Joff Winterhart. We will be talking and drawing with the passengers of the No 1 Bus that runs between Weymouth and Portland during the b-side festival in Dorset in September 2010, and writing a No 1 single for the bus.

Around Here - Commissioned by Somerset Art Works to collaborate with public artist Simon Lee Dicker during September 2010 to explore the art of place making in Langport, Somerset (SAW Open Studios Event 71 on Saturday 2nd October) with each artist focusing on a different aspect of the place now or as it might become. We are also researching and consulting with the community for a prospective larger scale project around play and gardening in public spaces for 2011.

Guest contributor to the Ashden Directory, a website about green issues and the performing arts, writing a series of three pieces for their Flowers On Stage summer blog. Go to the site to read other contributions about flowers on stage.

One - The Daffodil - about Mary Southcott's performance 'Let's get some weather in here'

Two - The Lungwort - about Ruskin, flowers and a site performance in the Brantwood dining room

Three - Snake's head fritillaries - about making site performance on the Dartington estate.

Associate Lecturer in Devised Theatre at Dartington College of Arts : 2001 - 2010

Teaching devised contemporary theatre and site-based performance practices across the Undergraduate BA Honours degree course at the internationally renowned Dartington College of Arts (now relocated to University College Falmouth July 2010).

As well as teaching compositional practice and theory, I also worked as a module co-ordinator for Theatre stage one, organising schedules, visiting artists and presenters and teaching materials. In 2010 I was the module manager of the Theatre stage one Site projects, and developed the Learning Space content for three modules.

Dartington's approach to working with context and place was highly influential to many of the graduating artists and makers and to the international field of contemporary site performance practice. I worked alongside Phil Smith and Simon Persighetti (Wrights and Sites), Sally Watkins, Katie Etheridge and David Williams.

Eat Dartington

To mark the end of the college at Dartington, I collaborated with graduating theatre student Maritea Daehlin to build gingerbread models of the college studios and buildings. The event took place at Festival 2010 (as part of the curated programme 'Shaking Hands With Ghosts') and after a short performance piece, we invited people to 'eat dartington'. Watch the video of the event here.

For David William's document of the event and the performance text go to his blog here.

Lead Artist (and mentor) for Routes River Rail: A Connectivity and Legibility Study for Taunton Deane : December – March 2010

Commissioned by Taunton Deane Borough Council to look at way-finding in relation to routes along the River Tone and through Taunton town centre., and to create a coordinated approach to public art commissioning in the town through community and partnership consultation.

Working in collaboration with Diana Hatton (Public Art Advisor) and placement artist Natalie Parsley, we consulted with a diversity of people through interview, conversation and image making. I collaborated with participants to make maps, photo and text works and videos as creative responses and interventions.

The project concluded with a symposium in March 2010 with councillors and representatives from the RDA, CABE, strategic town planners, the TDBC Public Art Panel and public organisations from Taunton which commended the research and the creative recommendation document
written and produced by the RRR team.

Visit Natalie Parsley's blog on the project here. To download the recommendation document and for more information, go to Somerset Culture website here and scroll down to end of Routes River Rail project.

Lead Artist for Reach Devon : Soundings : 2009

Working with elderly people and young people in two communities in rural Devon - Milton Abbot and Princetown - making sound programmes drawing on the lived experience, thoughts and ideas of the residents and participants, and creating opportunities for inter-generational exchange and conversation.

Soundings is part of the Reach project, a pilot programme running across the South West and funded by the NHS and Arts Council England to explore new ways of working at the meeting point between art and health. Reach Devon has the particular focus of working with elderly people to explore the needs and challenges associated with mental health and well being. Reach Devon is run by Aune Head Arts and Villages In Action.

Using packs of question cards alongside drawing and animation, the project has brought together a diversity of people - elderly residents, teenagers and children - to dialogue, discuss, make and draw around the subject of mental health, well being and community.

In Princetown, short films and animations have been made as part of the project through collaborating with animator and artist Joff Winterhart. Two sound programmes resulting from the conversations and exchanges in Milton Abbot and Princetown will be produced for broadcast in Spring 2010.

Soundings site at Aune Head Arts

Watch Soundings digital portraits and animations

Artist and facilitator for Made In Somerset - 2009

Invited onto the steering committee for Made 2009 by Take Art, to bring new ideas into the biennial event for performance makers in Somerset. I introduced two new events to the platform: a Practice event showing new experimental work from across the UK, through collaboration with Dominic Somers and TheatreWorks, and a symposium to discuss new ways of making and producing performance work in Somerset, with speakers Emma Stenning, Executive Director of Bristol Old Vic and Sjoerd Wagenaar from PeerGroup in the Netherlands.

Transience - a digital artwork made in response to the Neroche landscape - 2008

This web based artwork was commissioned as part of the Somerset Artworks / Neroche Scheme project ‘Revealing the Landscape’ on the Blackdown Hills on the Somerset-Devon border. The work explores migratory and transitory paths made by humans and non-humans across the Neroche landscape.

Working over the 11 months between January and November 2008, through walking and driving, encounter and conversation, I collected a diversity of materials and ideas which have been mapped into an interactive site: short videos, texts and images embedded into a click-and-drag map.

Transience maps some of the migrations and movements of seeds, birds, earth, butterflies, people, weather, satellites, water, cars and moths.

www.nerochescheme.org/transience

A blog documenting the collecting process is here:

www.suenerocheartwork.blogspot.com

All the videos from the work can be viewed here:

www.youtube.com/user/Nerocheartwork

Research paper presented:
'Transience: oh bird, curious road, rush veneer' at Living Landscapes, an international AHRC funded conference on performance, landscape and environment in Aberystwyth June 2009.

It Is For The Tiger - 2005-2009

A performance talk about tigers and humans.

I love the tiger, and it would still eat me, yes.

This solo video-performance work looks closely at our relations with tigers, the 'wild', our desire to rescue and adopt, anthropomorphic corporate behaviour, our love. Thoughtfulness, humour and desire collaborate to imagine the tiger more alive than extinct, more fur-nomenal than digital.

Performed at (2005-08): Made In Somerset (Artists Showcase), Dartington College of Arts, Georgia State University Atlanta, Exeter Phoenix, Fareham Library Dads n Lads Group, The Phoenix Project in Glastonbury, Anti-Static Festival at the Brewhouse Taunton, Desire Lines Arts and Ecology Conference at DCA, Devon, Arts Depot London, Bristol Mayfest 2008 and Buckland Dinham near Frome.

It Is For The Tiger will be available shortly via the web

www.biggerhouse.co.uk/tiger   

Difficult Pony - experimental video and animation work - 2007

A series of short videos, texts and animations around horses and women, girls and ponies and my 1960s toy farm. The work is inspired by and uses movie trailer soundtracks and gymkhanas.

watch videos

Visiting Artist at Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia USA: April 2006

Invited by visual artist Pam Longobardi to the Arts Faculty for presentations of performance both documented and live, discussion and sessions with students.

The residency was the beginning of a collaboration with Pam, resulting in the video installation “Murmuration – Aplexus/Starling” exhibited at the Air Quality and Climate Summit, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Atlanta, GA May 3-4 2006.

field: May 2005

Director and facilitator of the arts lab residential weekend for performers and practitioners in Somerset and South West, produced by Take Art and funded by ACE, which encouraged experimentation in making and producing work, creative dialogue and an exchange of methodologies and practice.

psi: mid space: 2003-04

Arts Council England funded performance project touring South West England, (March - July 2004) including Dartington College of Arts Gallery (work in progress), Cheltenham Festival of Science, Exeter Phoenix, Quest Mind Body Spirit Festival (Devon) and The Phoenix Project  (Somerset).

The project engaged performance, video, intensive research and conversation with audiences to explore psychic phenomena and the power of thought. Through the work, we undertook research and experimention into 'psi' with the internationally recognised parapsychologist Dr Serena Roney Dougal, and clairvoyant/artist Carolyn Findlay.

'psi: mid space' was made in collaboration with performance artists Vic Llewellyn, Lisa Griffiths and filmmaker Stephen Clarke. The dedicated website holds much of the research gathered on psi and the ganzfeld, links to significant sources, quicktime movie clips and photo library.

Research papers presented:
'On psi and performance' at the International Conference of the Society of Psychical Research September 2004, Winchester UK

"psi: mid space: the ganzfeld as source for performance" at Altered States: transformations of perception, place and performance, a transdisciplinary conference, The Planetary Collegium, University of Plymouth, July 2005

www.biggerhouse.co.uk/psi

Hair Raising: A Year of the Artist Residency - February 2001

A combined arts residency all about hair, in GJs Hair Salon, Shepton Mallet, Somerset: a devised site specific performance in collaboration with Vic Llewellyn performed over 10 day residency.  The subject of hair was intensively researched, from interviews with trichologists and biologists, to hairdressers and sufferers of hair traumas, producing a highly acclaimed event and documentation.  Audio documentary netcast from the Hair Raising website on hair trauma. Installations, story books and magazines architected into the salon.

Invited as key contributor to South West Arts YOTA assessment symposium. Project featured in the publication '365 Year of the Artist in the South West' and in New Theatre Quarterly (Cambridge University Press - May 2002)

www.biggerhouse.co.uk/performance/hairraising

MA in Cultural Performance 1999-2001

Bristol University in collaboration with Welfare State International (John Fox and Sue Gill).  Course emphasis: place-specific performance and installation combining critical theory with practice as research.  Intensive study of 'ecologies' of theatre, research processes, documentation and archiving, contemporary performance practice, public and community art practice:

- Research project producing a random access real space/cyberspace documentation on PLATFORM - an interdisciplinary company (arts/ecology/ democracy) making place-specific work in London. http://www.platformlondon.org/audio.htm

- Resident artist/maker for The Season of Shadows at WSI in Cumbria collaborating with WSI artists and Cambodian Shadow Puppeteer

The Price of Clouds

- A site-specific work in residence at Brantwood, former home of John Ruskin at Coniston, Cumbria; an 18 minute 'performed' guided tour of the Dining Room for the general public visiting the museum, resulting from intensive research and study of Ruskin's life and work - July 2001.

1998-2001  Co Director of Biggerhouse Productions

Founded with Stephen Clarke, Biggerhouse created new and original work for live events, video and the web, creating one of the first internet radio stations in the UK.

Glastonbury Net Radio: one of the first Internet Radio Stations in the UK using Real Player netcasting 15 original programmes from the site: documentaries, discussion, drama, new writing, with a specific commitment to the arts and social change. Over 100,000 listeners since Feb 99.

Productions included:
Afterlife: a 30 minute programme documenting radical thinking about life after death

Theatre, Politics and Social Change - Augusto Boal: a programme      documenting the Artangel produced 'Art of Legislation' in London

Tracing the Map: a 45 minute audio documentary in 4 parts about the changing face of Glastonbury High Street from 1900 to 2000.

Listen to the programmes via our archive blogpsot

www.biggerhouse.co.uk/archive/glastonburynetradio

1992-98 Freelance performer, director and teacher:
researched, wrote, and performed solo and collaborative work:

Magdalene toured SW England to colleges, arts centres and festivals, including International Meeting of Solo Performance in Switzerland hosted by Teatro delle radici (92-95)

Visions of Hildegard - National tour, including a summer horse-drawn tour, as as a masked actor and shadow puppeteer with Horse and Bamboo Theatre of Rossendale, Lancs 1996

The Legend of the Creaking Floorboard - 7 month international tour with Horse and Bamboo Theatre working as a maker, lead masked actor, bunraku puppeteer and workshop leader 1997

The Quay Thing - a four month season of site-specific performance in Exeter with Wrights and Sites as a performer and collaborator 1998.

Teacher and Director: 1984 - 2002

Numerous devising theatre residencies and sessions in educational contexts: Secondary schools, Primary Schools and Colleges (A level and BTEC) across South West England (87-96).

Residencies included:
- Directing final production of graduating theatre students in production of Garcia’s One Hundred Years of Solitude at SCAT in Somerset.
- Director and workshop leader of A Monkey’s Tale, a youth theatre production at Belmont Arts Centre in Telford.
- Co-Director of a series of 3 residencies with BTEC students at Strode College, Street.

- Visiting Lecturer to MA in Cultural Performance at Bristol University (2001/2)

1982-1992 Founder member of Gog Theatre:

One of South West England's leading companies.  Gog specialised in new devised performance work for regional and national touring, and international cultural exchange. Core member: performing, directing, teaching, administrating, managing and producing.

Key Projects: initiating the first independent Youth Theatre Exchange with Russia (1989), a theatre exchange programme with Rustaveli Company of Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia (1990), and a nine week tour of West Cameroon with a programme of workshops and performances (1985).

Performance: Series of devised T.I.E and regional touring productions to schools, community arts centres and theatres, including: 'Gi'us A Light' (1983), 'Ambitions' by Phil Smith  (1984), 'Pack Up Your Troubles' (1984-85), 'Into Africa' (1986), 'A Comin' Home' (1987) and 'Birdman' - National UK Tour including tour to Republic of Georgia 1989-90.

Research

My research is currently integrated and embedded into my arts practice: site based work, devised performance, digital video and animation, dialogical and interdisciplinary practices, audio and sound work. Consciousness, the structure and workings of the mind, the field of psi, meditation practices, transpersonal psychology, animal and animal mind.

Work featured in publications:

Hair Raising project:
Fiona Wilkie, "Mapping The Terrain: A Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain" New Theatre Quarterly 70 (8:2), May 2002
& in Bob Butler, "365 - Year of The Artist in the South West" Bridport: Agre Books 2001

“psi:mid space: the ganzfeld as source for performance” published in The Liquid Reader, The Plantery Collegium, Plymouth University (2005)