In my practice, I work with texts and the performative acts they can generate, such as speaking, listening, reading, and writing. These acts attempt to situate texts, and the fictions they can produce, as sites of somatic semantics, in an effort to orientate praxis, or inform ways of acting and living in the world.
I received the award in 2015-16. Over the last year it has gone a long way towards a much needed studio space near my university of Goldsmiths, vitally facilitating a dedicated workspace, which has transformed my practice. In addition, the fund has enabled a research trip to St.Gallen in Switzerland, where I was able to gather a lot of first-hand material about the Abbey and Plan of St Gall, and to visit a site in southern Germany, where they are constructing a version of the settlement based on the ancient ninth century plans. This has significantly helped me produce a body of work about a stuttering monk and a mnemonic form of stuttering song he popularised into European liturgy, long before the interpretative revolt of the Reformation.
Young artists only beginning to develop their practices, of which I am only one of many, face overwhelmingly impossible situations of crippling financial precarity, where multiple waged-labour positions are the bare minimum entry-point required in order to begin to self-sufficiently afford to participate in the production of art in London. I’m wholly grateful for the financial support I have received from The Chelsea Arts Trust. Without their generous support, only made possible through the continued generosity of its members, many more young artists such as myself would simply disappear into the abyss.