About

I am an artist working with drawing, currently studying for an MFA (Fine Art) at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. I studied Fine Art part time at Leeds College of Art and Design, (BA, first class 2010) and was awarded the University Armes Prize for my work on this course. I have many years experience as an academic (most recently as Senior Lecturer, University of Leeds, UK, 2003--2026, and currently Visiting Research Fellow, University of Leeds) working in Computer Science as well as in interdisciplinary projects involving the Arts and Humanities. This research has included work on novel conceptions of space in the digital humanities based on the ideas of qualitative spatial representation. My earlier qualifications include BSc (Mathematics) and MSc, PhD (Computer Science) from the University of Manchester.

I have been using light as a drawing instrument to map routes and to visualize the environment in new ways. The light comes from streetlights as well as passing traffic and other sources of light at night. In a single walk I often collect hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of images. These are photographs with exposures of usually one to four seconds taken as I move. The gestures, although recorded digitally, are traces of my physical movement and the movement of the camera. The use of digital tools here, including code to arrange thousands of images, is entirely as a tool to make bodily movement in the world visible; this is not "digital art" or the use of AI to generate images. The process is like "drawing by moving the paper". The drawing surface is the camera sensor and the lights trace marks across the surface during each exposure. The marks depend both on the way my body moves and on features of the environment, such as the types of lights and the nature of moving lights from traffic. The gestures captured depend partly on the terrain: uphill or uneven surfaces encourage different kinds of movement. The drawings can be read as results of a mapping process and there are connections with psychogeography and conceptions of geographic space beyond pinpointing locations with numerical cooordinates.

Recent exhibition
Drawing Walking, In A Land Gallery, Hebden Bridge, April-May 2026.