My participatory creative practice explores the intersections of archives, memory, place, found poetry and film.
Working collaboratively with communities and drawing on archival and found materials, including oral histories, conversations, photographs, documents and the sensory details of everyday life, I create poetry films that weave together text, voice, sound and image. Fragments of language, memory and experience are transformed into immersive poetic works that connect past and present.
I am drawn to the rhythms of everyday speech and the expressive qualities of voice, treating language and sound as poetic materials alongside moving image and text to explore how memory, meaning and emotion are carried across time.
My work seeks out hidden and overlooked stories, creating a dialogue between archive and lived experience while revealing the extraordinary within the everyday. Through poetry film, I explore how participatory storytelling can animate the archive, giving voice to memories that resonate across generations and inviting audiences into deeper encounters with place, empathy and shared human experience.
I facilitate reflective and creative writing practices that support wellbeing and help people explore, shape and share their stories.
I offer workshops in writing for wellbeing for community groups, organisations and institutions. I create gentle and inclusive spaces for reflection and writing which are designed to be accessible to people with a wide range of writing experience.
Workshops draw on prompts, reading, listening and sharing and integrate therapeutic writing approaches such as poetry therapy, expressive writing and bibliotherapy. They can be tailored to particular themes such as memory, identity, place or change. The emphasis is on process rather than product and on supporting participants to engage with writing in ways that feel safe and meaningful.
I have delivered workshops for clients including the University of Warwick, University of Leicester, Writing East Midlands, Rutland Adult Learning & Skills Service and Leicester City Libraries. I have worked with diverse audiences including people living with mental health challenges, women living with menopause, carers, medical students and healthcare professionals and care home staff.