Artist & Video Maker based in Liverpool
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.
Worrying times in London at the moment, and to me, it feels like it’s been coming for a while. Living in Liverpool, but often working in London, and having previously lived in London for 15 years, it’s sad to see it become other worldly. Looking back London was a place of excitement, somewhere where you went that was accessible, diverse and full of life. Now it just feels corporate and unobtainable.
An offshoot of this is a project I was working on with Re-Dock last year, Happy Birthday RVT, celebrating 150 years of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. The RVT is the UK’s oldest LGBTQ pub and iconic performance space, Towards the end of the project, the venue was sold to Immovate, a re-development company with a history of turning turning places into luxury flats and hotels.
The result is the launch of a campaign to look out for the Future of the RVT. You can sign up at RVT.community The campaign officially launches tomorrow at the Cinema Museum in Elephant and Castle with a screening of the film that came out of the Happy Birthday RVT project, now called Save The Tavern. Here’s the trailer. With some many cultural spaces closing down and people being forced to move due to high rents, it feels like it’s time to make a stand.
I filmed this earlier this month over the course of a day at St Paul’s Church West Hackney. Hopefully, the film demonstrates how the building is in constant use throughout the day. For me, it was really interesting to see how much cross-over from the different groups, showing how essential the space is to the local community.
Last year, My friend and Re-Dock Co-Director, Sam Meech had been working with Tmesis Theatre Company developing visuals for a new show called ‘That’s Amore’. Funding to produce the show came in quite late and Sam was unable to continue work on it, so I jumped in to take over.
I’ve worked on Theatre visuals before, notably, ‘Tiny Volcanoes’ and ‘the Readers Wives Fan Club‘.
With visuals for theatre, it’s always tricky to get the balance right, where the projections add to the performance rather than becoming a clever but unnecessary distraction. With this piece, there was also 3 weeks of rehearsal and tech, which included changes and new ideas to the visual design and I wanted to do these in line with Sam’s original aesthetic, allowing the piece to have some sort of visual consistency.
Last week, was the first outing for the new show with 5 performances at the Unity Theatre in Liverpool. It was a tough start, with lots of lighting and visual queue changes and getting the piece lit well without washing out the screens was always going to be a compromise. I had some projector issues (one of them crashed during a rehearsal), and a few times, both projectors were accidently knocked out of position during some re-focusing of the lights requiring some last minute realigning. All in all though, it came together and it feels like it’s in a good place for the small tour that’s taking place this month, mainly in the North West. Now that everything is fixed, I can actually stand back and look at the piece as a whole and I think there’s some really beautiful moments in it. The tour should be fun too. I’ve linked below to some images from the show as well as some of the reviews.
Last year, I went down to Dunstable, to film the ‘Wind Charming Day’ following up from my initial film the year before called ‘We Are Now‘. The project was developed by Artist Laurence Payot and it was great to visit Dunstable again a year later and see how the project has developed.
This is a short music video for a song call ‘Rise’ by Grace Petrie that I worked on. It was directed by Chris Shepherd. Chris grew up in Ainfield and had the idea to film the video around a lot of the changes and demolition happening in the area. I managed to get hold of one of the demolition team who gave us permission to film on and around one of the demolition sites. We spent a day filming the area as it was and as it began to be demolished around us and then a few hours films the band perform on an area of grassland that used to be a school.
The finished video was shown recently on Channel 4 as part of Random Acts.
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.
This month, my friend Sam Meech asked me to film some documentation for the final stages of the Punchcard economy project that he has been developing over the past few months.
It was really amazing seeing Sam’s ideas developing into physical form. For me, the project not only made me think as a freelancer about the hours that I work, but also about how much I work in the digital world and how nice it is to see something physical being created. The banner is on display at FACT in Liverpool for the next 3 months and you can find out more about the project here
Members of the 1 In A Million You tribe reveal themselves in Liverpool City Centre.
1inamillionyou.com