Thinking-With, Making-With, Becoming-With

Collaboration isn’t an accessory to my work — it’s foundational. From early alliances in the 1980s to current ritual-digital artefacts, my practice has consistently sought the collective: as method, as ethic, as aesthetic.

I work across disciplines — performance, text, image, sound, and publishing — but what sustains the work is a recurring impulse toward the shared. This isn’t about convenience or delegation. It’s about mutual aid, co-authorship, and critical intimacy.

Whether with artists like Stuart Brisley (The Peterlee Project), Ulay (Fortress Europe), or through long-standing networks like Gruppen, Feral Press, and collaborative walkshops, the throughline is this:

 

Collaboration not as rehearsal, but as a practice of co-existence, resistance, and attention.

 

Influenced by thinkers like Bakhtin, Haraway, Kropotkin, and Nancy, I see collaboration not as a smoothing of difference but as a site of friction and possibility. A place where co-creation resists closure, and meaning remains open, processual, unstable.

These practices manifest in multiple forms:

 

• discursive poetry with Heather Yeung

• performances and participatory sonic scores with Dean Brannagan

• digital performance-poetics with Ilektra Maipa

• photographic results from performances with Simon Drury 
• video works with Julieanna Preston

• field-publishing experiments via Feral Press with Paul Wakelam

• and socially embedded manoeuvres across urban and rural sites

 

Each collaboration shapes a different logic, but all are rooted in thinking with others — across time, place, material, and voice.

“To collaborate is to build a structure of attention.”

Collaboration, for me, is a way of displacing the myth of the individual genius. It interrupts the market logic of singular authorship, and instead affirms a kind of polyphonic practice — one that listens, adapts, remembers, and reconfigures.

I call this the inoperative community — a phrase borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy. It suggests that the work is not to build fixed unities, but to stay with the porous, the incomplete, the becoming.

This page offers a glimpse into that thread — one that runs quietly and persistently through over four decades of shared, situated art-making.

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Selected Collaborators & Collective Works

This section is a growing index of individuals, networks, and distributed projects that have shaped and continue to shape the work. Where possible, links are included.

Coming soon:

• Stuart Brisley – The Peterlee Project

• Ulay – Fortress Europe

• Heather Yeung – Poetry & Scores

• Dean Brannagan – Sound Manoeuvres

• Ilektra Maipa – Digital Performances

• Feral Press – Field-Publishing Experiments

• Gruppen – Collective action group (link forthcoming)

• Julieanna Preston (link forthcoming)

• Simon Drury (link forthcoming)

To explore collaborative projects in more depth, visit the Projects / Fieldworks / Performances archive.

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