I am excited to have been offered an artist residency at The Mussoorie Heritage Centre, Uttarakhand, India, during October and November 2026. The centre is housed in an historical building dating from the 1830s. In 2013 the family decided to dedicate part of the building to heritage, education, art and craft. The residency includes the use of a studio and an exhibition of work in the onsite Gallery. More news soon!

I’m delighted that my work has been selected for the upcoming exhibition Prayers for Peace exhibition, at Water Street Gallery, Todmorden “The human spirit and vision seems to be creaking under the strain of world events like never before.  Art is needed in our lives like never before. We hope that this exhibition will fill this winter with joy and hope from symbolic expressions to meditative experiences. Some artists will want and need to to address the absence of peace full on with visual comments  on the effects of world… Read more: Prayers for Peace exhibition

4th – 10th June 2025, Opening on June 4th 6-9pm. Do come along to see the work of all the featured artists if you are in the area.

A new book of poetry by Anne Gruenberg, The Music of the Soul’s Give and Take: Selected poems by Anne Gruenberg 2022-2024 features my drawing Night Drum on its front cover. Anne and I were at school together, with Kelly Davis, who has edited this moving and important collection of Anne’s poetry. Beautiful photographs by Clare Park accompany the text. Available from Amazon, “This poetry collection continues the story begun in A Square Foot of Sky: a reawakening in words and images, 2019-2021, after Anne Gruenberg’s incarceration in a… Read more: Night Drum

I am delighted that one of my drawings has been selected for the Drawing (Paper) Show  which will be on @bridewellstudiosliverpool during Liverpool Biennial ’23 from Friday 21st July until Sunday 13th August. The other exhibiting artists are: Alex Wolkowicz @xandrinchen Anna Hutton @annahuttonartist Arthur Roberts @artlooop Athena Jones @athenasymeonjones Bryan Biggs @ink_and_spit Camilla Smithwick @cammysmithwick Caragh Savage @caragh_savage Carriage Return @carriage_return Christina Rose Brown @christinarosebrown Cristina Celestini @cristina_celestini Curtis Holder @curtisartist Daksha Patel @daksha9art Emma Withers @emmajwithers Gabriela Vargas Telaya @atelier._g Gail Altschuler @gailalts Gary Clough @garyclough… Read more: Drawing (Paper) Show

In 2012 my sister Antonia Riviere and I were visiting fellows at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. We were there researching Australian clothes rationing during World War 2. We were interested in how film had been used to support the government’s austerity drive, whether Australians had been encouraged to ‘make do and mend’ like their British counterparts, and how we could use our own making to explore these and other questions. Here are two speeches about the  exhibition Mr Dedman’s Victory Suit, the first sent… Read more: Speeches

Mr Dedman’s Victory Suit: Intimate stories of make do and mend, an exhibition that runs from April 15th – August 30th 2013 at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Special Collections, concludes our fellowship at the National Sound and Film Archive of Australia and brings our contemporary filmmaking and textiles practices into conversation with historical materials about make do and mend. The exhibition displays many of MMU library’s wonderful wartime publications full of make do and mend tips, plus objects from MMU Special Collections, Norfolk Musuems and Archaeology Service, the Gallery… Read more: Mr Dedman’s Victory Suit: Intimate stories of make do and mend – an exhibition

We’ve been home for several months now, but the thinking and making we began in Canberra hasn’t stopped. Towards the end of our residency things got very intense. We had to get everything finished for the presentation that fellows are required to do at the end of their residencies. Then there were books to finish reading and a film to begin to edit. Antonia completed the pullover she had been making throughout the residency (see the film below) which went on display in the foyer of National Flm… Read more: Home again

While we were in Canberra we interviewed several people with experiences of Australian clothes rationing. Barbara Stanilewisc (who we were introduced to by Lynne Johnson), gathered a couple of her friends together to talk to us, Patsy Curnow and Ruth Rodgers. Barbara and Patsy have been friends since they were very young; and it turned out, to our amazement, that Ruth was none other than the daughter of John Dedman, the Minister of War Organization of Industry between 1941 and 1945, the inspiration for our fellowship project title.… Read more: An unexpected interviewee

While in Canberra we have been talking to several people who were children or teenagers during World War 2. Gwenda and Maureen who are friends of Jenny Gall, the co-ordinator of the research programme at NFSA, are two of those who agreed to speak to us. Gwenda, a folklorist whose research is about children and childhood, spoke to me on the telephone from Melbourne. She was seven years old when the war started and told me that as a young child she had been very well dressed. Her… Read more: Plackets, trophy trousers and the smell of new fabric

When we arrived at the archive almost four weeks ago, a shelf of DVDs and video tapes were waiting for us in our large, well-equipped work room. While we were preparing our application, Ant had done some searching for films using the online catalogue and we thought of these awaiting titles as a useful starting point for our project. As it turned out, Ant’s search had been very thorough and there was very little lurking in the archive that had not been on our original list. We had… Read more: The beauty of film

In Braidwood last Saturday I had a small breakthrough with our research. After having gloomily wandered up and down the long wide streets for a couple of hours (more on this below), I went into a second hand bookshop and found what turned out to be the ‘right’ book. Braidwood is an ex-mining town about 100km south of Canberra. A bus passes through the town twice a day on its way to the South coast, leaving Canberra at 7.30am and heading back at around 4.00pm. It was good… Read more: “The continuing dialogue between living and dead”

We have been at the National Film and Sound Archive for a week now, and every single day has been packed with amazing things to do – a tour around the NFSA site out in the Mitchell suburb where huge amounts of archival material are stored and processed; a tour through PATS, the preservation and technical services where materials are painstakingly restored, reprinted, photographed etc.; and a number of meetings with the incredibly helpful and knowledgeable NFSA staff. The staff have given us useful instruction/suggestions/mentoring: from how to… Read more: Inside the archive

The subject of mending and re-using textiles threaded its way through many of the conversations we had while we were visiting Marina – re-purposed clothes have been an integral part of Marina’s personal aesthetic for years, and as I enter my tenth month of clothes buying abstinence, mending is no longer just a challenge and a pleasure, it has become a necessity. In the course of our discussions Marina remembered a mended dress she had seen exhibited at the Costume Collection Yarra Park, so before leaving for Canberra… Read more: Mending and re-puposing – by Ant Riviere

Yesterday Ant and I arrived in Canberra at the National Film and Sound Archive where we will be spending seven weeks on the Scholars and Artists Fellowship programme. Our research focuses on improvisation in art and life, approached through some of the moving image and sound materials the archive holds on WW2 austerity. In the last couple of years Ant has been working with materials that are immediately available to her. She began using remnants from family life after going to a conference about basketry. Baskets can employ… Read more: The National Film and Sound Archive

In 2012 my sister Antonia Riviere and I were visiting fellows at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. We were there researching Australian clothes rationing during World War 2. We were interested in how film had been used to support the government’s austerity drive, whether Australians been encouraged to ‘make do and mend’ like their British counterparts, and how could we use our own making to explore these and other questions. The day before we arrived Marina took in a stray cat she’d found roaming around… Read more: A coincidence of Agnes(es)

In 2012 my sister Antonia Riviere and I were visiting fellows at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. We were there researching Australian clothes rationing during World War 2. We were interested in how film had been used to support the government’s austerity drive, whether Australians been encouraged to ‘make do and mend’ like their British counterparts, and how could we use our own making to explore these and other questions.   I am in Melbourne with my sister Ant. We are on our way to Canberra… Read more: Past and future threads

I’ve just returned from India. I was there last in 2010 with Steve Dixon and Cj O’Neill working on The Pol Project and making the film Entry. This time I travelled first to Delhi for the ASA (Association of Social Anthropologists) 2012 conference where I was co-convening a panel on improvisation with Anne Douglas and Kathleen Coessens, and then Anne and I went on to Ahmedabad in Gujarat for a few days. Anne Douglas is Head of Research at Gray’s School of Art so we did talk shop… Read more: India

A Kind of Making – a talk at Fabrica Gallery, November 2011 I was invited by the artist Naomi Kendrick to give a talk at Fabrica Gallery in Brighton. She’s been developing a series of sessions on professional practice with Liz  Whitehead who is a co-director of the gallery. The programme explores various approaches to working with diverse audiences using the contemporary visual arts (see more at A Multisensory Approach). I began by showing a twenty minute film I’d made in 1996 about the artist Peter Goode.    … Read more: Talk at Fabrica Gallery

Artists’ Residency NFSA In November 2012 my sister Ant Riviere and I will be taking up a joint Research Fellowship at Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra. We’ll be looking at the role of improvisation in the generation of new knowledge and experience in artistic practice and everyday life. Using a range of archival materials we’ll focus on austerity measures imposed during WW2, and contemporary revivals of make do and mend, and investigate how materials that have already had a first life come to influence a… Read more: News