Mixed, medium artist and award winning restaurateur usually found working in the real world.
I was already making work to contemplate and investigate authenticity and syntheticity through various modes of practice and by over-layering levels of awareness, when I was approached by Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in 2015 and asked to create a restaurant art project at the gallery. The independent restaurant, which I created and operated with my collaborators for over 3 years was transformative for the gallery and within the town, having been commissioned as a useful art project that would both contribute to and critique mima's new stated orientation at the time as 'the UK centre for Useful Art'. at the time mima planned to establish a "pioneering model" with an ethical mission to "replace spectators with users and authors with initiators''. A successful Arts Council Capital Works Grant application by mima at the time stated "This is more than remedial work but a strong conceptual statement to ‘correct’ a building designed around spectatorship, to become one built around usership".
My pre-existing concerns, and ultimately my experiences at mima whilst navigating its bureaucratic administrative conditions has led to my beginning to frame my work as a research question into relationships between spectacle and post truth.
I have often worked with participatory practices, in often nuanced ways, collaboratively or in terms of an ongoing dialogue with others and with a set of ideas that then acquire a narrative arc. My extraordinary work and experiences at mima for example - has in turn led to further contemplation of use, uselessness and agency and antinomies of experience that may surreal and absurdist nature of the gallery's institutionalised administrative condition. My experiences My usefulness, uselessness and agency as an attempt to process something of this experience, so that my institutional critique of mima is ongoing.
