Sexuality and Culture: moreover, you are currently pursuing your PhD in Contemporary Art at Lancaster University: how does this experience that influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum inform your approach to art making? Hello, and thank you for inviting me to talk about my work. I started my BA and MA in my mid forties, after I’d been working in various jobs. Most recently, I had built a small business using new, affordable desktop publishing software using my own writing and photography. I was already working with words and the visual image, so it was natural that I chose modules in film and photography in my studies. But I was interested in art and its relationship to society as a cultural process, rather than pure aesthetics or history. I’m inherently multi-disciplinary, and would draw anything I felt was relevant from anywhere, working across boundaries, connecting and translating. In my view, authors and film directors are some of the most astute observers of society, and their perspectives can add richness to academic analysis. It was during my BA that I discovered Second Life, having coming across a mention while writing an essay. I only intended to be there for the weekend, just to check out what it was! But I was enthralled by it as a space, both aesthetically (the good, the bad and the ugly) and as a social environment. My first job was as an architectural modelmaker, so I think the three-dimensionality also attracted me. During 2014, I decided to wind up most of the business, and I was looking for employment. It seemed obvious to build on the MA, and I got a job at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal in visual arts and in marketing. I started working with video to support my marketing role, and I kind of fell into its artistic and creative possibilities as a consequence of wanting to practice. Editing is the part I enjoy most, and in retrospect, that is the thread that runs through my life, using different media at different times. While working at the Brewery I visited Lancaster University to look at an MA course, but after an hour of chatting with one of the tutors
interview
Women Cinemakers