About

Hello there! Welcome to my website, nice to have you here. Please have a look around and feel free to be in touch if there’s anything you would like to know a bit more about.

More about me

I am a theatre maker, ​actor​ and clown from Gadigal Land/Sydney. I seek to tell stories that speak challenging truths about ourselves and our world, reconnect audiences to themselves, their communities and environments and provoke dialogue and change toward more sustainable futures. My work and theatre shows are often highly physical and combine elements of clowning, audience interaction/participation, spoken storytelling and physical comedy. 

“a performer and storyteller dedicated to instilling a sense of wonder in her audience” Broadway Baby

I believe wholeheartedly in centering culture in the fight for climate justice. As writer and activist Rebecca Solnit wrote, ‘the current ecological crisis is a crisis of imagination.’ I wish to positively contribute to creating imaginative solutions to the climate crisis.

As a theatre maker, I have devised, performed and professionally toured six theatre pieces. I received the Creative Scotland Touring Fund to make and tour The Bush, a play about the incredible women who saved Kelly’s Bush (Sydney) in the 1970s. I devised a way of touring the show ‘carbon light’ by bike and train, to perform outdoors on community run venues. I’m proud to say this work won me and my team the Creative Edinburgh Sustainable Creative Award 2022 and I received funding to make a guide/zine about the touring experience with Aie Aie Aie theatre company, Rennes, France.

I received the Imaginate Family Encounters commission to create Experts Radio Lab, an immersive performance work for young people for the Edinburgh International Children’s Festival. The ‘pop up radio booth’ centred and celebrated young people’s experiences and ideas. It was performed as part of the Family Encounters at the National Museum of Scotland, at Platform’s Bridge Festival (Glasgow), Junior Festival Toronto and Festival of the Sea

Recently, I produced and toured Waves, my solo show, to rural and regional venues in Victoria (Australia) in a co-production with Rural Arts Victoria and to India with Think Arts, Kolkata. This was the tenth year the show has toured, beginning life at Edinburgh International Children’s Festival in 2014. It has been performed close to 300 times.

My clown show The Bean Counter has been presented at UK festivals Latitude, Deer Shed and Solas and twice at the Edinburgh International Children’s Theatre Festival Family Day at the National Museum of Scotland.

Alongside performing I also facilitate workshops for a variety of different groups. I have been Artist in Residence with A Moment’s Peace theatre company, working as a workshop leader for their Womens Creative Company, facilitating playful workshops in clown and comedy. During Lockdown, I received the Edinburgh Fringe Community Outreach digital commission, to lead workshops for children and people with English as a Second Language. For this I created ‘Bean Counting 101: The Art of the Count’, an interactive, heavily improvised, seriously fun workshop/ performance teaching the noble art of bean counting. 

My Spotlight View pin with full performance credits are available to view at https://www.spotlight.com/interactive/cv/2450-4530-8954 

 
 

My practice and commitment to environmental sustainability

I start from the point of view of wanting to use my arts practice to help create a more sustainable environment and future. in order for humans to be able to create a sustainable future together, we are going to need to radically shift the way we think about the way we live on this planet. In order to make this shift, we need to alter our ways of thinking and doing; our culture. To get to where we need to be to cope with the ongoing catastrophe that is climate change, we need to be constantly adapting and changing, not staying where we are- because that has got us into this mess. We must imagine other futures and this means thinking in new ways, taking risks, and experimenting- and these things must be made desirable and encouraged from a young age. ‘Great’ art is a potential way of making these new ideas both tangible and attractive. 

Sustainability is at the core of my practice. As an artist, I aspire to make work that is political, challenges societal norms and advocates new ways of seeing and being in the world.  I create works that are imaginative, thoughtful and daring, grounded in a deep concern for our planet’s future, a sense of shared responsibility and fascination for the Everyday. I am passionate about environmental sustainability and want to be part of a movement that shifts our culture toward a more sustainable future. This thread can be seen throughout my work:

• My first play, When Alice Cooper met Prince Harry was created as an attempt to transform everyday objects into something wondrous so that audiences looked again at what they have, and perhaps, in doing so not yearn for the ‘new’. 

• A theatre-work Puffin, made together with Snap Elastic theatre (Eszter Marselko and Claire Willoughby), explored uncertainty in the face of climate change.

• Blue Cow that explores contamination and how our desire to tame our natural environment has dramatically impacted specific communities. 

• During my residency at Sura Medura, Sri Lanka, I chose to focus on the intersection between sustainability and gender, and work with local women and girls. This follows on from an ongoing commitment I have made to tackle, UN Sustainable Development Goal 5 Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

• I worked for three years at the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) Sydney where I supported a wide range of sustainability projects and vastly deepened my knowledge and passion for finding creative ways of solving environmental challenges. While there I created an environmental super hero Captain Eco Pants.

• With Creative Carbon Scotland I have worked on a development of Blue Cow as part of their Culture/shift program and led a creative storytelling workshop about climate change adaptation.

•I have been employed to create a sustainability action plan for Independent Art Projects.

• I regularly attend events focusing on art and sustainability, including Adapt/Modify at the Wellcome Trust and events as part of Creative Carbon Scotland’s Green Tease programme.