Stories of Alienation and Disaster exhibition exploring our relationship with the natural world and the invented world

Stories of Alienation and Disaster is a set of artworks, funded by Arts Council England, bringing together fictional and non-fictional accounts of natural and technological disasters, exploring our relationship with the natural world and the invented world. Differing accounts, from folk narratives and film stories, offer insights into how we respond and understand these crises. Colliding the differing forms of these narratives offers a set of new artworks that utilise existing conventions engaging the audiences in the ways in which we communicate these subjects.
The work consists of a set of letterpress prints, audio recordings and videos. Songs were recorded live to wax cylinder, formed around traditional melodies used within disaster song folk culture and the letterpress prints used the tradition of the broadside, depicting newly composed lyrics related to disaster film narratives. The videos, depict the phonograph machine playing the cylinder recordings, allowing the viewer to engage with the machine itself as the sound is reproduced.

As the work engages with the intersections between humans with both the natural/animal world and the technological world, it has contributed to contemporary debates in both of these areas. Its inclusion in the exhibitions The Animal Gaze Returned and Techné indicates the breadth of these discussions.
Exhibited in Stories of Alienation and Disaster solo exhibition, Die Raum, Berlin October 10 — November 18, 2011.
Exhibited in The Animal Gaze Returned, London Met University. Oct 24 - Nov 11th, 2011
Artists included: Edwina Ashton, Steve Baker, Suky Best, Darren Harvey-Regan, Kathy High, Bob and Roberta Smith, Snaebjornsdottir/Wilson.
Exhibited in Needle in a Cloud, Fold Gallery, London 14th April - 19th May 2012.
Artists included: Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen, Gabriel Hartley, Jack Newling, Nick Goss, Simon Callery, Tim Ellis.

Exhibited in Techné, Hanmi Gallery, London 19th September – 29th September 2013. Artists included: Helen Benigson, Jemima Brown, Simon Morse, Pablo A. Padilla.