An early-00s performance and live music night in a Bristol working men's club. Dance on the tops of multi-storey carparks. Naked people dancing to techno in a fading shopping centre. A bombed-out church humming with continuous live performance for 24 days, attended by 15,000 people.

I've spent twenty years trying to make things like this happen — putting art in 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, produced projects with independent artists from Bristol, the UK and beyond, and later hosted residencies in a dedicated space in St Anne’s. The thread through all of it was a belief that art should be part of how we live, not separate from it.

I'm now working out what comes next. Through a Clore Fellowship and an Arts Council DYCP grant, I'm exploring the things I care about most: the civic role of culture, the just transition, new economic models, 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 easing me nicely into middle age.