I was once unequivocally an artist and it turned out to be a job that I didn’t enjoy half as much as my teaching job. I left my gallery and did a PhD to figure out why I ended up making expensive stuff for rich collectors, because that was not my idea of what being an artist was about. It turns out that producing exclusive commodities is just one of the many functions of the art world. It also legitimises power, receives state funds to carry out state policy, enhances sponsors’ corporate image and visibility, converts cultural capital into financial capital for institutions, generates profits from unpaid labour, accommodates money-laundering, arms-dealing and the list goes on. By the time I got to the end of my research I had lost all ambition to be part of the art world. In the mean time, I went underground and discovered Exploding Cinema, an open-access, open-membership, unfunded film collective. It’s just one of many small independent organisations that have the potential to create a shift in the power dynamics of the field, by recognising that it is the producers who legitimise the institutions and not the other way around. Artists might not be able to change society, but they can change the role that art plays in society.

I studied sculpture and work with all kinds of media. Collaboration and process are central to my work, I’m interested in social structures, institutions and networks and in ways of making their dynamics visible. The underlying concern in my work is with identity, and how it is constructed through relationships, between individuals, societies and authorities. I’ve used mimetic critique and performative self-representation as means of deconstructing structures and conventions.

My recent work is a series of sound interventions, Her Master’s Voice Presents (2012) periodically broadcasts announcements in public spaces, challenging the disembodied voice of authority. These are modelled on public service announcements and their content is drawn from political speeches, institutional Tweets, news articles, advertising, personality profiles, horoscopes, self-help books and personality assessment tests. This work reflects my interest in challenging the authority of institutions and exhibition conventions and my ambition to escape the confines of the art world by producing work in public space.

My PhD interrogates the scope of ambition in contemporary art and demystifies the art world. Entitled The self-conscious artist and the politics of art: from institutional critique to underground cinema, my thesis is a critical reassessment of aesthetic autonomy in art as culture industry. I define the art world as an institution of legitimation that disempowers artists and audiences alike. I address the institutionalisation of critique and the once-controversial relationship between art and politics alongside a critique of “participation”. I consider the displacement of meaning and value from the work of art to its context and the conditions of its production and circulation. The final chapter makes the case for building a network of autonomous art spaces and practices.

I am compiling a database of independent and artist-run spaces in the UK and researching the practices, histories, motivations, funding sources, goals and constitutions of independent venues and networks through interviews and surveys. This work will culminate in a Festival of Independents, a week-long event for independent organisations to engage with the concept of independence.

I teach studio practice, curating, critical theory, history & philosophy of art and video & film production. I taught Critical Studies and Studio Practice at Goldsmiths (2007-2010) and I currently teach short courses at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL (2009-present).

In 2015 I founded ART&CRITIQUE, an alternative art education network based in London and 2019 I co-founded the Radical Pedagogy Research Group, a research project on alternative art education, radical pedagogy and self-organisation.