Glasgow School of Art Portfolio
Master of Research: Design for Health & Care
Sketch of the Borrelia burgdorfi spirochete, the causative bacteria in Lyme Disease (June 2022)
Moving image loop from Seawards the Great Ship (1960), Dir. Hilary Harris, Templar Film Studios, 35mm (National Library of Scotland: Moving Image & Sound Collections).
Soundtrack by Ouse (Ben Donehower, Charles Ballas & Conor Walker) from Acicular Ooze: An Environmental History of Magnetic Tape (Conor Walker, IASA 2020).
Diptych improvised sketch by Jennie C. Grant. I performed alongside Grant’s visual score, which informed my sound collage and vice versa (Sail Britain: The Life of Islands, 2019-2020). The field recording (below) was captured during the Sail Britain: Life of Islands residency (2019) with a stereo-pair of hydrophones. Along with other recordings from the residency, it was used as raw material for the audio-visual performance.
Mtsvane Monastery (The Green Monastery), Borjomi, Georgia (2019)
photo credit: Good Press
Journeys Across Breath (Prototype, 2022) contains poems transcribed from Stephen Watts’ readings in the Scottish Poetry Library Audio Collection, which I digitised during multiple waves of the Covid-19 lockdowns while I was afflicted by Long Covid and Lyme Disease (Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, National Library of Scotland: Moving Image & Sound Collections 2020-2021). During this period, as a result of hearing his voice played back from the 1980s and a pining to connect while isolating, Watts and I became penpals.
“Typeface for Amanda” (p. 124) was recorded onto cassette during a Scottish Poetry Library recital at the Christopher North House Hotel, Edinburgh (27 September 1987).
Kelp alignment tape - carrying iron & minerals of seabed forests | Acicular Ooze: An Environmental History of Magnetic Tape (IASA 2020)
Poem (page left) featuring motifs within the affect of chronic illness – grief, alienation, embodiment/disembodiment, et al. (rizograph print from Good Press' The Paper, August 2022).
Painted cassette inlay (front & back) by Marion Guillet. Bladder by the Light is a conceptual cassette compilation, published on my Obsolete Future imprint. Marion and I compiled it while learning how to live with invisible disability. I wrote, edited, and designed the 5-panel layout. ‘Bladder’ refers to kelp bladders, the bubbled buoys that reach up to the light, but it’s also a play on the song title “Blinded by the Light” and a personal reference to the neurological-urological axis, which can occur with complex chronic conditions.
Map for a sound poem composed of magnetic tape fragements captured at incorrect speeds (2021).
Diptych scan of an acrylic eye for a presentation by Ocularist Claire Moore – “A Practical Guide to Ocular Prosphetics” (NHS GGC Ocular Prosphetics Lab, Gartnavel Hospital 2023).
Sketch of the TCM herb Danshen (Salvia miltorrhiza), used in Long Covid and Lyme Disease as a blood purifier and for a diverse range of coagulopathies (2023).
Artwork for I have feathers / Gentle fishes [BODY001]. The 1st in a series of C90 mixes for the Body Politic community. The title stems from a pair of lines from Gertrude Stein's "Lifting Belly" (1917). We are one lung, "difficult paper and scattered. Lifting belly is so kind." (2021)
UNLS016/1 (DC-86-17): ‘A short interview utilising a translator. Miss Koshanova, previously an engineer at Moscow Aviation Institute, now retraining as a soprano at the Moscow Conservatoire, discusses her career’ (Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, National Library of Scotland: Sound & Moving Image Collections).
Sound carriers, such as the magnetic tape pictured above, are diagnosed with syndromes; sticky-shed-syndrome (caused by hydrolosis), vinegar syndrome, et al. In my role as Audio Preservation Engineer and a worker with complex illnesses, conservation processes provoke a key question: what are the intended outcomes of care? Archiving at the hinge between analogue and digital realms the answer is simple – care provides temporary immunity for the sake of playback for teh sake of digitally capturing recordings – to transfer recordings from a sick to a secure body. When applied to the embodied living experience though, questions around the intentions and purpose of care lead to more mercurial ground. Industrial AV objects approach obsolescence, whereas people are subject to different life-cycles under a range of social and environmental determinents of health and disease.
The oral history segment below, which I transferred on behalf of Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, provides reflections on the death of the interviewee’s mother, grief, the politics of family, the class division between parents, the sacrifices and ‘selflessness’ of motherhood, and the guilt of how such sacrifices prevented the mother from ‘developing a politics of her own’.