Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I am a British-Finnish artist, composer and performer based in Scotland. My interdisciplinary projects blend together vocal composition with costumed choreography, visual scores and drawings, within live performance, film and audiovisual installation. Environmental concerns have been the focus of much of my work to date. I specialize in working with voice and movement to tell ‘stories’ about reworlding in times of biospheric crisis. With a largely place-responsive process, I consider how bodily relationships and folk histories are encoded within specific environments, ecologies and places. From traditional music and dance to contemporary club culture, I often draw on embodied vernacular knowledges, in particular, practices of vocal and gestural ‘mimesis’ of the more-than-human, to offer alternative approaches to making kin. Most recently, my work has engaged directly with urgent questions around the psychology of the climate emergency, specifically, how to meet and process complex emotions that come with ecological awareness.

While at Headlands

While at Headlands, I plan to approach my residency in two ways. Firstly, I intend to take time to reflect on my practice outside of the cycle of production and begin to plan my first monograph book to feature essays and images from the last decade of my practice, ready to publish in 2025 with Beam Editions. Secondly, as an artist based in Scotland, making place-responsive, ecologically focused work, the chance to travel far from home and engage with the unique ecologies of the Marin Headlands is an exciting and meaningful opportunity. It has long been a goal of mine to spend time in California, to visit various iconic habitats and encounter species I have read so much about. Time spent walking, listening, reading and thinking, and being open to encounters with both human and more-than-human beings alike, will be the diving board into deep new research, out of which I anticipate growing a new body of work.