I am an artist, researcher and senior lecturer in photography. I joined the Photography department at the University of Portsmouth in 2017, and in 2024 I was appointed to the role of Course Leader MA Photography. I completed my doctoral research entitled Sites of Unlearning: Encountering Perforated Ground (2018) at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, with an awarded studentship from the London Arts and Humanities Partnership.

In my artistic practice, I experiment with analogue printing processes of photographs and hybrid printmaking techniques, video, sound and text. Through practice-led artistic research, I explore conceptual, material and poetic visual methods to enact processes of unlearning in sites of conflict. Issues of political violence and the plurality of collective memories and identities inform my artistic methodology. Outcomes of my work led to various international exhibitions, public talks and academic publications.

My practice research engages with socio-political issues relating to conflict, violence, collective memories and processes of forgetting. It is informed by a continuous interest in methods of unlearning, which emerged from the need to question dominant ideologies that inform and restrict the way we see and encounter the landscape. My project Sites of Unlearning: Encountering Perforated Ground (2014-2018) aimed to make visible the perforation of the land through conflict, occupation and militarisation. The word ‘perforation’ represented the violent ways in which language and histories are utilised in the construction of national identities and ideologies. In this project cultural and political narratives, my own entangled biography and the material sites of making, such as the darkroom and print room, were weaved together to evoke processes of unlearning.

My recent photographic project Punctuated Land (2019-2023) explored the enduring legacies of conflict and the historical and political forces that enable and perpetuate its normalisation. In my practice, visits to the landscapes of Israel/Palestine became the means to encounter and record the traces of violence and impact of maintaining dominance over the land. Tracing de facto borders in Israel/Palestine and spending time in the occupied territories of the West Bank, were methods of observing how conflict gets inscribed on the verges and in the overlooked; including trees and other natural entities. This project examined how living in ongoing conflict filters into the ground and into language, and how this informs how we view and interpret images.

Drawing Breath(less), is a practice-led research project (2023-ongoing) that expands my research interests into forms of slow violence, air pollution, ecology and health. Drawing from various connotations relating to breath and breathlessness as a form of urban exploration, survival, and even protest, this project brings together experimentations with a range of artistic methods. Through photographic practice and material explorations, this project seeks to illuminate the impacts of climate change and the changing environment on the body, as it is considered through a socio-political lens. Exploring two- and three-dimensional methods of representation alongside, and inspired by, scientific processes of mapping and data collecting, the works examine tangible ways to engage with the seemingly invisible impacts of climate change.

This work was part of the interdisciplinary and international project on the Impacts of climate change and the environment on physical activity and sleep: a joint project by University of Engineering and Technology (Viet Nam), Viet Nam National University (VNU) and University of Portsmouth (UK). It was supported by the British Council through the UK/Viet Nam Season 2023 programme.