Land connection Generative action Community care
Art / Anthropology / Nature
Hi, I’m Dandy!
I’m a multi disciplinary artist and social anthropologist, living and working across the British Isles. I can be found working from my studio in Kent, foraging along the coast or walking the ancient Blean.
My work is rooted in feeling and relationality, exploring different ways of connecting to people, place, identity and culture through the sensory, the sensual, ceremony, and storytelling.
My work focuses on multisensory engagement by employing visual arts, sound, scent and texture in a cacophony of writing, waters and resins, clay bodies, and fibred forms. My work is kaleidoscopic and personal, peering through a queer and disabled lens, and deobscuring the stories that are perhaps less valued in the wider media with creativity and care.
My research practice sits at the confluence of film, archive and ethnography, with a focus on autoethnography, queer ecology and eco feminist theory. These themes conspire in a delightfully curious and play centred creative practice.
I work professionally as a filmmaker, writer and community mobiliser on regional projects with non-profits, CICs and charity groups across Essex, Kent and London.
2025
The Land That Raised Me
Screened as part of Creative Estuary Festival 2025, The Land That Raised Me is an experimental film essay on the fragility of memory, identity and belonging. Co-creative entanglements with plant, land and animal kin illuminate our liminality as multiplicitous beings. We are continuously remade through ‘otherness’.
What is memory if not merely an impression? Bent by the gooey vibrant enmeshment of all things. Non-linear, sticky with feeling, soft with vagueness and manipulative fluidity.
How might we redeem the world through folk and fairytales? What can storytelling offer us in reimagining ourselves and the world we inhabit?
How does the land, it’s stories and ecology shape who we become? Iron rich berries become blood, the trees expand the lungs, honey rots the teeth and wets the tongue.
In the Land That Raised Me, tiny fingers reach to the enduring plum tree, the garden and forest commune in a bristling lagoon of green, pond becomes sea and all are combed for unfamiliar creatures, the blister of nettle sways across time. Dandelion is called for in the garden, the river and the burial site.
Sensuous Ecologies: Feeling the Environment
2025
Sensuous Ecologies is an ongoing research project (germinated as part of Thanet Experimental x Hold Creative Spaces residency in summer 2025) exploring the intersections of sensuality, the body and the natural world. I’m interested in understanding how sensory and emotional experiences—especially touch, smell, and bodily perception—inform and are informed by our relationship with ecological systems.
The project emerges from a desire to challenge the extractive and othering lens through which we often perceive both pleasure and nature, proposing instead a more embodied, affective, and reciprocal engagement with ‘other’ bodies. This is a new strand in my broader artistic and research practice, which has previously focused on environmental poetics and land-based work.
The residency was celebrated with an immersive, multisensory and collaborative body of work shared in Hold’s gallery space, speaking to sensuality as a site of opening to new understandings of ecological interconnection and mutual care.
Winner of the Hugh Brody Prize in Visual Anthropology, 2020
Residencies Exhibitions Projects
Exhibitions & Screenings
The Land That Raised Me, Solo show, The Shop Front Cliftonville, 2025
Sensuous Ecologies Immersive exhibition, Hold Creative Spaces, Ramsgate 2025
The Land That Raised Me, Creative Estuary Festival Screening, Hadleigh Old Fire Station Essex, 2025
My Whole Heart is a Garden, Icons of Cliftonville, Dreamland, Margate, 2025
Leave Me To Rot, Shortlisted for Margate Pride Disabled Artists Open Call 2025
My Grandmother, The Forest, International Women’s Day, The Minories Gallery, Colchester, 2025
Dandy: On Weeds and Queerness, BRINK Residency Showcase, Margate, 2024
Shrines, Endangered Craft exhibition, Marine Studios, 2024
The Golden Cage, University of Kent Visual Anthropology Screening, 2020
Homo Alebrije, University of Kent, Marlowe Gallery, 2020
Residencies & Projects
Sensuous Ecologies: Feeling the Environment, creative research residency with Thanet Experimental & Hold Creative Spaces, 2025
Estuary Dreams experimental filmmaking, Creative Estuary Workshop Series, 2025
BRINK Residency, Margate Pride — development of film/costume practice (Dandy), 2024
Films
The Land That Raised Me, Estuary Dreams, 2025
10 years of POW Festival, Power of Women Thanet, 2025
New Rumours, Margate Pride, National Lottery Heritage Fund, 2024
Queer As Water, in collaboration with Dr Sé Mali
Dandy, BRINK Residency, Margate Pride, 2024
Statement of Asylum, Undertow CIC, 2024
The Golden Cage, Visual Anthropology dissertation, 2020
Publications & Artist Books
Dandelions, ‘Beltaine 25’ Wydro Zine, 2025
Dandy: On Weeds and Queerness, BRINK Zine, 2024
Straight Sex: A post liberation anthology, Rewriting Sex, self-published 2022
Awards
Hugh Brody Prize in Visual Anthropology — The Golden Cage
Academic Excellence in Social Anthropology, University of Kent, 2020
Education
BA in Social Anthropology, University of Kent