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.

Since MAYK I've been working out what that belief looks like at a different scale — not just making the case for culture inside a building, but for why cities make worse decisions without artists and imaginative thinkers in the room. Through a Clore Fellowship and an Arts Council DYCP grant, I've been exploring how planning systems, investment decisions and public institutions might take culture seriously as infrastructure, not add-on — and testing that thinking through live projects in Bristol and further afield.

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