Communicating about art, architecture and the wider creative ecology.
I am a natural communicator, an articulate speaker and advocate for excellence and equality across the arts – from music, through architecture to contemporary art. I have written for a wide range of consumer and specialist titles, from national newspapers to professional design publications, so I understand the importance of tone of voice and awareness of audience. These skills are of great value in translating projects, whether exhibition or building design, into concise, entertaining and informative publicity material. Whether press release or website content, I aim for authenticity and clarity, as well as impact.
Services
Talks
Copywriting
Editing
I love to host or present great stories, practitioners and projects on live platforms. There is nothing I like better than to delve into a conversation with someone I admire - which Studio International has put to great use by commissioning multiple filmed interviews from me with artists over the years, selecting me as their Venice Art Biennale interviewer for the last four festivals in a row.
Informed by curiosity and generosity plus rigorous background research, I think the real turbo charge in any conversation is pure, undiluted interest.
I am increasingly asked by established and emerging UK architects to help with storytelling across their whole websites. The more clearly we can articulate their unique cultural, social and aesthetic DNA, the more likely they are to attract like-minded clients and staff.
I have also worked with leading interiors and exhibition designers over the last two decades to communicate complex projects for the greatest clarity and impact.
As a team member or freelance I have always taken a proactive role, believing my job is to enrich and support the publications I work with and reflect the most interesting, provocative and pioneering people in their field. I actively seek out projects that are exemplary, original, and with an emotional, environmental and social intelligence at their core.
As a freelance, I carefully curate my own output, seeking to showcase only projects that are exemplary, original, and with an emotional, environmental and social intelligence at their core.
Talks
For three years (2019, 2020, 2023) I curated a strand of the Surface Design Show celebrating ingenuity and placemaking through materials as well as sourcing locally and re-using materials. I also hosted panel discussions at Architects @ Work.
In 2021 I initiated and then hosted an Open House talk on Sociable Housing for a time of Social Distancing, together with architects Stolon Studios. I have hosted screenings of fascinating films and moderated Q&A sessions with film-makers (including a sell-out event with filmmaker Karen Guthrie in Peckham in 2018).
In 2016 and 2017 I devised, programmed and co-ran two events at the London Festival of Architecture, around placemaking, with the Peckham Weeklies community interest group (see editing).
I went solo for a Pecha Kucha at the 2018 Dundee Design festival.
Copywriting
My passion for communication has found many outlets, including helping those whose primary skillsets might be visual rather than verbal, on a consultancy basis. This includes creating and fine-tuning key website messaging, writing monograph essays, end of year reports or press releases.
In the last year, I have been trusted with the entire website storytelliing for O'Donnell Brown, Hugh Broughton Architects, ROAR and Tom Parsons.
When re-use and salvage geniuses Retrouvius needed to tell the story of a particularly tricky country house project, they sought my skills for their entry in a RIBA book on collaborative practice.
In 2019, I was employed as a communications consultant on three new masterplanning and placemaking proposals. One was Gomm Valley, a project steered by Jonathan Smales of Human Nature (formerly MD of Greenpeace), an ambitious and highly sustainable, contemporary and community-centric new village in Buckinghamshire. I worked with Periscope architects to develop the priorities, language and visuals around their proposal for Enfield Borough Council’s Meridien Water, a new edge-of-borough quarter mixing light industry with wild nature and a progressive mix of live/work and family residential.
I have spent the last two decades working with Real Studios, creators of groundbreaking exhibitions, to convey the rich array of 2d, 3d, AV and interpretative skills they have deployed to bring their client’s stories to life, from David Bowie Is for the V&A to the British Museum’s Living with Gods.
White Arkitekter, in seeking to break into the UK and European market, invited me to write the bulk of their end of year reports, interviewing key personnel and setting the tone of voice, for two years in a row. They are now firmly established in London.
Editing
I know all the nuts and bolts of putting a magazine together, having been editor, managing editor and creator of magazines both online and in print.
For 10 years I was senior contributing editor at Blueprint magazine, bringing stories from a multitude of sectors and regions that expressed the magazine's bold and visionary spirit, celebrating the best of art, design and architecture across the world. Sadly, since its demise in 2020, no other magazine has offered quite the same breadth of coverage across the creative industries, with anything like the flair, wit and imagination.
From 1996-2000 I edited two international magazines, running a six person team, dedicated to international brand retailing, showcasing enlightened practice across retail design, masterplanning, merchandising and product design.
I have also co-created and co-edited community publications arising from a 2015, Southwark-funded co-design initiative, to interrogate the qualities that Peckham residents wished to preserve around their station and high street. I co-edited the Peckham Weeklies newsletter, printed monthly for the first six months and then on an occasional basis, for a period of just under two years,
In 2008-9 I put together and edited a beautiful website together with my friend Caroline Collett that filled a gap we felt was missing in the women’s magazine market. Called MagnificentMe, we featured women artists, photographers, designers and also real life stories, celebrating women’s inner lives, individuality and creativity, as an antidote to the general women’s magazine obsession with diet, fashion and celebrities. It ran for four editions, garnered 30,000 visits per issue, and was interrupted on its trajectory to us seeking backers and sponsors and going full time only by the 2008 global economic crash.
I devised, edited and wrote high quality, aspirational publications for a variety of leading designers and architects, including BUJ, HMKM, White Arkitekter.