microbio(me)
I am a writer and artist from Edinburgh, Scotland. Across forms, my work circulates around ecology, relationality, and questions of how we human beings understand ourselves through telling stories about – and identifying with – other entities, from slugs to moons. I can be found writing sensual celebrations of hagfish and poetry that aspires to move like spores.
macrobio(me)
I am a writer from Edinburgh who is currently based in London, where I graduated in 2020 from the MA Writing at the Royal College of Art. My writing and visual work explores messy embodiment, unruly ecologies, and how human beings understand themselves through images, metaphors, things, and other beings. My book project, Cephalopodomania, considers the octopus as a figure in contemporary culture, and like the octopus, it shapeshifts through different states and registers, changing its approach to the reader.
Passionate about interdisciplinary, collaborative, and experimental writing – particularly where it intersects with art – I have taught writing courses at venues including Camden Art Centre. My audio work has previously been commissioned by the BBC and ICA, my essays and criticism have been published in periodicals such as ArtReview, MAP Magazine, Aesthetica, and 3:AM Magazine, and my fiction has appeared in anthologies such as DreamsTimeFree and NOIT Journal. Mycoglossia, my first poetry pamphlet, co-written with Nina Hanz, was published in December 2022 by HVTN Press, and is an experimental exploration of mushrooms and spores.
I gravitate towards strange incidences, fantastical life cycles, and stories of enthusiasm and obsession. In my own work, I, too, work through minor obsessions, spinning and weaving together dozens of branching research paths. I revel in simultaneously celebrating, theorising and critiquing pop culture where it converges with the weird, and I seek out the unseen majesty or potential histories in minor things and overlooked beings: a stick of chalk or a stain, worms and plankton. Recent projects have seen me theorising slime trends on YouTube and fictionalising the formation of the human skull. Right now, I’m thinking about plastics, the sea surface microlayer, Bagpuss, and – as always – cephalopods.
By day, I am part of the Editorial team at Serpentine, where I work on film, text, audio, Serpentine Podcast, and the Art + Ideas publishing platform.
