The Slaughterhouse Club

For the last 5 years I have been working with Artists Robin Whitmore and Mark Whitelaw on Duckie’s The Slaughterhouse Club.

The Slaughterhouse Club was a participatory arts project with homeless vulnerable Londoners struggling with booze and addiction issues. The project ran for forty weeks per year until 2020.

The participants – about 45 hostel residents regularly working throughout the year – were treated as artists and encouraged to make creative work. Together they make songs, poems, stories, short plays, animations, puppet shows, slide shows, paintings, films and videos. The Slaughterhouse Club engaged residents of the hostels to connect with themselves and their community through the creation of these arts activities – to aid harm minimisation and personal growth.

The work was very delicate and the hostel environment is very unpredictable. Our participants lead chaotic lives, and struggle with entrenched alcohol and drug addictions, fragile mental health and often run-ins with the authorities. Most of the work was one-to-one, drawing out creativity through personal conversations and developing inventive exercises. The Slaughterhouse Club was produced by Duckie in association with Thames Reach Hostels and funded by the Big Lottery Fund and Vauxhall One.

The Workers

A new body go work by U.S born artist Alexis Teplin premiered at the Bluecoat in Liverpool in October 2019 in her first major UK exhibition.

I worked with Alexis to create the film ‘The Workers’ which was exhibited as part of the exhibition. Alexis wanted to document the creation of a large wall mural, treating the workers as performing artists and we achieved this over two days using clean jump cuts to show the passage of time.

My Clockwork Heart

I filmed Patrick Dineen‘s new show at the Unity Theatre a month ago and we’ve since put together this short trailer for the piece. It was a tricky show to film just because it was performed in the round and it was quite difficult to find a filming location that wasn’t an obstruction for someone. Really interesting show though – lets see where is reappears.

Symbiosis: Social experiments with Living Sculptures

I’ve been working again with Artist Laurence Payot in a project collaboration with the Universities of York and Sheffield, Bedford Creative Arts, and Tate Liverpool.  We travelled to York before Christmas to with some Scientists in the form of an art-science encounter, drawing parallels between the artworks/audiences/participants relations and symbiotic relationships in nature.  This video gives a little feel of the workshop.  I found it fascinating, just from the form the the language the scientists were using to talk about the experiments.  It was like being in a different world.