How do imagined futures become the conditions of everyday life?
My research explores how worlds are imagined, made and inherited, and how different ways of knowing and experiencing them might open possibilities for living differently.
I have long been interested in the stories that science, technology, governments and institutions tell about progress, and how these often differ from the knowledge, experiences and ways of being of the people who inhabit the worlds they describe.
My recent research follows these questions into climate transition. Ambitions such as net zero, electrification and the circular economy do not remain abstract visions of the future. They become embedded in infrastructures, landscapes, policies and everyday practices, assembling new relationships between people, materials, institutions and ecologies.
I am interested in what happens during this process of worldmaking. What is carried forward from the past? What new relationships and dependencies emerge? How do people come to understand and negotiate these changing conditions? And what responsibilities arise when the futures imagined by some become the worlds that others must inhabit?
Working across artistic research, critical design and interdisciplinary climate scholarship, my writing brings questions of knowledge, participation and collective imagination into conversation with the material lives of climate transition.
Current research
Carbon Afterlives, 2026
Climate governance, infrastructure and the persistence of carbon
What happens to carbon when we say it has gone away?
Developed with Dr Matt Lane, Carbon Afterlives follows the material and political lives of carbon through different approaches to climate mitigation.
From carbon capture and geological storage to avoided extraction and the infrastructures of low-carbon energy, the research examines how strategies understood through the common language of net zero produce different social, ecological and material arrangements.
Rather than treating decarbonisation as a singular pathway towards a low-carbon future, the project asks what kinds of worlds different mitigation strategies are already assembling. What histories and dependencies do they carry forward? What new forms of governance, maintenance and care do they require? And who becomes responsible for their long-term consequences?
Research manuscript: Beyond Atmospheric Equivalence: Carbon Afterlives and Net Zero Worldmaking — co-authored with Dr Matt Lane.
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Worldmaking in Delay, 2026
Transition design, electrification and inherited futures
What happens when anticipated futures have already begun making the world?
Worldmaking in Delay investigates how imagined futures acquire material force long before they arrive.
Through the relationship between global electrification and Zambia's Copperbelt, the research traces how ambitions for low-carbon energy become embedded in extraction, investment, infrastructure and political commitments.
It considers how the pursuit of futures in one place can reorganise the conditions of life elsewhere, creating dependencies and responsibilities that persist beyond the decisions that produced them.
The research develops the concept of deferred worldmaking to reconsider the relationship between design, anticipation and responsibility. In place of beginning only with the futures people wish to create, it asks how design might attend to the worlds already being assembled through past and present commitments.
Research manuscript: Worldmaking in Delay: Designing With Futures Already Inherited.
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The Afterlives of Relations, 2026
Digital labour, persistence and responsibility
What happens when the relationships we create continue to act beyond us?
Returning to questions first explored through Playbour: Work, Pleasure and Survival, this essay considers the relationships and dependencies that persist beyond the circumstances in which they were formed.
Moving between digital extraction, artificial intelligence, plastic traceability and carbon storage, it explores how technologies and infrastructures carry forward histories of labour, extraction, value and responsibility.
The essay connects my earlier artistic research into networked technologies with more recent investigations of climate infrastructure, asking how relationships endure, transform and continue to shape the possibilities of everyday life.
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Making Home, 2024
Care, waste and maintenance in the arts
What does it mean to care for the things, places and relationships that sustain cultural life?
Developed from research undertaken during an Artangel Making Time residency, Making Home explores the everyday material practices through which cultural institutions are sustained.
Through conversations with arts organisations about waste, storage, production and resource sharing, the research follows the often overlooked work of maintaining, repairing and caring for the things that make artistic activity possible.
It asks how environmental responsibility might be understood through the relationships between workers, materials, institutions and communities, rather than through waste reduction or carbon accounting alone.
At its heart is a question that runs through much of my practice: how might changing the ways we relate to things also change the ways we live and work together?
Artistic research & methods
Collective wayfinding
How might different ways of knowing help us find our way through uncertain worlds?
My artistic research approaches curating as a shared space for collective enquiry, story building and meaning making.
Rather than treating knowledge as something produced by experts and communicated to audiences, I am interested in what happens when people encounter one another's experiences, questions and ways of understanding the world.
Through exhibitions, collaborative research, experimental institutions, workshops and public learning programmes, I develop situations in which different forms of knowledge can meet, challenge and transform one another.
I think of these processes as collective wayfinding: moving through uncertainty, noticing the things we can see as much as those we cannot, and developing ways of understanding and acting that emerge through relationships.
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PIWO — Portalling-With-Others
Developed through my doctoral research, PIWO (Portalling-With-Others) is a curatorial methodology concerned with how artistic practice can create openings between different ways of knowing, experiencing and making worlds.
Drawing on the idea of portals as moments when familiar arrangements become open to question, PIWO approaches curating as a relational practice through which people can encounter unfamiliar perspectives, examine their assumptions and experiment with other possibilities.
It is concerned not only with imagining different worlds, but with the conditions that make collective learning and action possible: trust, reciprocity, time, resources and the willingness to work through difference.
Selected publications
Beyond Atmospheric Equivalence: Carbon Afterlives and Net Zero Worldmaking — with Dr Matt Lane.
Worldmaking in Delay: Designing With Futures Already Inherited.
The Afterlives of Relations: Work, Pleasure, Survival — forthcoming book chapter.
Making Home: Care, Waste and Maintenance in the Arts — 2026.
PIWO (Portalling-With-Others): Wayfinding for Curatorial Ethics in a Climate Emergency — 2025.
Everyday Adaptations — 2025.
Sunlight Doesn't Need a Pipeline — edited research publication, 2024.
Curating, World-Making & Dark Conservation — 2019.
[Download full publication list / CV]