AUDIO-VISUAL RESPONSES TO DOREEN MASSEY’S ARCHIVES
This series of portraits were made with the members of the public in and around the Kilburn Market and Metroland Studios, as an extended part of my A Kilburn Sense of Place project. Myself, Jasper Bowie and Jessica Nock set up a lofi photography backdrop in different locations across three separate days on summer, offering our photographic practices up to those interested in stopping by and having a chat with us. This practice saw us gift photographs to local people, whilst also raising awareness around the work of the late Doreen Massey. Copies of Doreen Massey’s a global sense of place were also freely disseminated as part of this project. Moving forward I aim to continue to offer up this free portraits service in spring and summer periods.
You can read more about the project here:https://metrolandcultures.com/news/doreen-massey-voices-of-places/.
You can also read Doreen's renowned A Global Sense Of Place essay here.
Photographs by Jasper Murison-Bowie, Jessica Nock and Nathaniel Télémaque.
AUDIO-VISUAL RESPONSES TO DOREEN MASSEY’S ARCHIVES
Working at the intersections of photography, film, and sound, I began photographing Kilburn’s urban landscapes between winter 2025 and spring 2026 as means to make contributions to the Doreen Massey Voices of Place project. Responding to Massey’s archive through a sketchbook-based photography project, as well a montage super 8 film and Kilburn soundscapes series, I was really inspired by Massey’s global sense of place essay and her experiences of living in Kilburn and endeavoured to use my artistic practices to pay homage to the beautiful chaos and order that characterise the Kilburn highroad and wider area. I hope that this body of work can introduce viewers in the locale’s unique geographies that motivated a great deal of Massey’s work and pioneering scholarship.
You can read more about the project here:https://metrolandcultures.com/news/doreen-massey-voices-of-places/.
You can also read Doreen's renowned A Global Sense Of Place essay here.
This short film was made as part of an audio-visual attendance to everyday life on the Kilburn highroad. Kilburn is a chaotically beautiful neighbourhood situated in northwest London. This locale was also a home to the late geographer Doreen Massey, who is renowned for her geographical imagination, which inspired new ways of understanding the uneven relationships between places in a globally-connected world. This mixed media montage film, contributes to a wider body of work taking place in and around Metroland Cultures, the Kilburn market and the highroad itself. Fundamentally this work was created as means to pay homage to both Kilburn's geographies and Doreen Massey's popular conception/essay A Global Sense Of Place.
You canread more about the project here:https://metrolandcultures.com/news/doreen-massey-voices-of-places/.
You can also read Doreen's renowned A Global Sense Of Place essay here.
Black Geographies of Kings Hill Dominica is a practice-based geography and audio-visual arts research project, that combines artistic practices in photography, filmmaking and soundscape recording, with geographic research activities in visual ethnography, autoethnography, semi-structured interviewing and archival research. Visiting the island for the first time in my life in 2024, this combination or artistic practices and research has come about as a means of creating critical dialogues around notions of home, heritage and belonging. A key aim of combining artistic practices with research activities is to allow this body of work to raise awareness of Dominica’s Black Geographies amongst both public and academic audiences. Thus in attempt to raise people’s awareness and inform them of the beauty and serenity that makes Dominica the special place that is, this project’s multifaceted and developing body of artwork and research draws on yearly visits made to Kings Hill Dominica between 2024 – 2029. Kings Hill is also the locale that my family have called home since the late 1950s and it is where I stayed the first time I visited the island for one month in the spring of 2024.
This locale was named in honour of the monarch of the day King George III and part of this hill (Morne Bruce Viewpoint) was used as the location of a British military garrison. At the foot of Kings Hill resides a catholic cemetery, a savannah and Dominica’s National Botanic Gardens, from which you can walk into Roseau, Dominica’s capital city. Prior to being a locale occupied by the botanic gardens which are usually spaces associated with green imperialism and colonialised inceptions, the 44 acres of land that makes up the gardens were previously a part of the Bath and Rose Hill sugarcane estate and former plantation.
Whilst initially focused on interrogating my own experiences of diasporic subjecthood, this project also engages with Dominican’s ideas relative to the poetics of Caribbean landscapes alongside their experiences and memories they associate with open natural spaces like the National Botanic Gardens. Dominica’s original name is ‘Waitukubli’ which means ‘tall is her body’ and this name was bestowed upon the island by the indigenous Kalinago people. These photographs serve as a means of visually attending to Dominica’s poetics of landscape, and the locale of Kings Hill. They are also a means of introducing you to the enlivened Black Geographies of Kings Hill Dominica, thereby acting as a small window into this developing body of work. Please do enjoy and make sure to watch the super 8 film and listen to the soundscapes featured in the project. Many thanks for reading and keep an eye on the space for future developments.
Drawn out from an auto-ethnographic practice-based project entitled: Kings Hill, Dominica: Framing Ideas of Home, Heritage and Belonging [working title].