An early-00s performance and music night in a Bristol working men's club. A 24-hour, 24-day continuous performance in a bombed-out church. Dance on the tops of multi-storey carparks. Naked people dancing to techno in a fading shopping centre.

I've spent twenty years trying to make things like this happen — bringing ambitious art into places where you wouldn't expect to find it, and watching what happens when people encounter it there. The thing I never get tired of hearing, is: I would never have thought of coming to something like this, but I'm so glad I did.

From 2011 to 2025 I co-directed MAYK with my dear friend Kate Yedigaroff. Together we curated Mayfest, Bristol's biennial theatre festival. We curated the live programme for Theaster Gates' Sanctum — a 24-day continuous performance in a bombed-out church attended by 15,000 people. We developed Confluence, a residency project exploring the changing city. The thread running through all of it was a belief that art should be part of how we live, not separate from it.

I now work independently, and I'm in the middle of working out what the next stage of my practice looks like. Through a Clore Leadership Fellowship and an Arts Council Developing Your Creative Practice grant, I'm exploring the things I care about most: the civic role of culture, the just transition, new economic models for culture, and what it really means to invest in place and in people gathering together.

I have an allotment and a time-share in a narrowboat and these things are helping me ease nicely into middle age.