Tiger Helix (Oblivion)

It began in a therapy session, in the first COVID lockdown. Close your eyes: what does freedom look like? In the blackness, a shining, convulsing double helix - looping like a Möbius strip, but chunky, made of shimmering tiger-print spandex, hands reaching out from inside its coils. Pretty weird. Pretty queer. That image has been an obsession ever since: a structure for thinking about freedom as cyclical, embodied, wild, always in process - reaching inside yourself to reach out to others, finding queer forms of freedom amidst disaster. A wild way to change and get free within post-COVID polycrisis, historian Adam Tooze’s term for a modern era where multiple, compounding risks reinforce one another, resisting any single fix, facing oblivion.

Spirals appear throughout nature at every scale - seeds, hurricanes, galaxies, DNA. Spiralism is also a Haitian aesthetic tradition of chaos, repetition, cyclical time. Learning from these cycles - growth and collapse, contraction and bloom - offers a way of navigating polycrisis. In the work, this plays out through morphic resonance: the pseudo-scientific idea that living things transmit memory to one another like radio waves. Waves circulate in the room: we’re self-conscious, we let go, we follow curiosity, we play, discovering together what emerges without preconception.

Morph suits are a central tool - tiger-print, synthetic, shimmering - blurring the boundary between human and animal, slipping the grid of gender and species into something material, animorphic, cartoonish, playful. Drawing on pop-cultural references like Animorphs, the tiger becomes a costume of our ideas about nature: synthetic fabric rubbing against the wild, real and not real held together. Touch shifts inside them: bodies move differently, with less friction, entangled, sensual and childlike at once. In a touch-starved, screen-mediated world, the work builds structures of acceptable risk - clear enough to enter and leave safely, open enough to let experimentation go further. The installation itself is a play space: a large Möbius strip of semi-sheer, screen-printed fabric loops overhead to form a circular stage, floor padded with foam and giant tiger-print cushions. Loop pedals, synthesisers and instruments sit alongside gymnastics ribbons and scrolls of poetic text - objects to be played, feeding sound and gesture back into the space as video projections beam across the loop, floor and ceiling. Nettles and development sites recur throughout, reclaiming ground at the edges of construction, marking (in English and Nordic folklore) the border between life and death: how does the body negotiate destruction and regeneration, grow through the cracks?

Strange Field’s site is next to a mass development site, previously homes raised to the ground and before that farm land. An interesting site to consider cycles of change and interaction with the land.

Tiger Helix (Oblivion) is a practice of co-creation and collective improvisation with objects and bodies alike - taking Lygia Clark’s and Sonia Boyce’s participatory, socially engaged principles and applying them to queer ecology - temporary, playful ecosystems where gestures, sounds and sensations ripple between bodies. A queer ecological world-building: funny, affective, unstable, permeable, always unfinished.

“The dream of the cell is to become two. The evolutionary thrust surges through us as dreams, sensations, longings, images, and inexplicable utterances and gestures... In aikido we surrender to the spiral that lives in the blood and plasma of our veins, to our circulating breath, to our turning dance in gravity, to the galactic revolutions that spin in the heavens.” - Richard Strozzi-Heckler

A 3-day test at Towner showed me what the elements needed to be. This project lets me realise them properly - and find new ways to expand participation with children, young people and queer families. The publication carries this further: part artwork, part improvisation score, letting anyone stage their own version of the work, wherever they are. This is a body of work still becoming - reaching for what collective freedom might look like next.











Past Work

Rave Time 2023 alternative time, collaboration & play
Southwark Park Galleries


Oracular Theatre 2020 - with Kerri Jefferis speculative fiction, co-created installation
ACE funded, Craven Arts


Idle Acts 2019 - with Kerri Jefferis estate improvised soap opera film, amateur actos & children
ACE funded, East Street Arts


The Table 2019 - with Kerri Jefferis co-built sculptural table made together; community work
ACE funded,  East Street Arts Leeds, Huddersfield University


Guttural Living 2018  with Kerri Jefferis, Serena Morgan, Kyla Harris, Zuleika Lebow and Edna. 
film & movement work, sculptural objects exploring intersection experiences of embodiment
ACE funded, METAL Southend & Scottish Sculpture Workshop


Selected Relevant Engagament, Access & Community Work

Access Support Worker, various artists/collectives 2020 - present
Facilitator Artists Sharing Day, Towner Eastbourne 2025
Live Art & Media, Guest Lecturer, Social Practice, Rose Bruford College 2022
Open Plan Summer Studio Facilitator, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne 2022
Founder & Programmer, MINCE WIP queer sharing night, London 2022 - present
Common Interest Residency Facilitator, UK New Artists Leicester Take-over, 2022
Into The Wild, Course Lead & Artist Facilitator, Chisenhale Art Place, London 2020 - 2023
Learning Programme​ ​Curator, Whitstable Biennale​, Kent​ ​2017 - 2020
Decolonising the Archive​ Project Space Residency ​Lewisham Arthouse​, 2019
The White House​ ​Curator, Create London, ​Dagenham, 2016 - 2018 ​
Artist Support Volunteer, Action Space​, ​Cockpit Arts, ​London 2012 - 2014