News
Toby shortlisted for 2023 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize
May 2023We are pleased to announce that Toby’s book proposal, Embryos Denied Mitosis, has been shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize.
Embryos Denied Mitosis fuses memoir and autoethnographic analysis in an examination of immigration and transitioning. Spanning personal and familial experiences of gender dysphoria, the Malayan Emergency, the UK immigration system, tier 1 exceptional talent visas, the British colonial penal code and historical gender plurality in South East Asia, the essay unpicks the legitimacy of identities assigned at birth and their entanglement in the history of colonisation and racialisation.
SHIFT FLECTURE: Ecology, Art and the Law
March 2023We will be delivering a flecture at the Gulbenkian Arts Centre. We will be discussing our piece Ephemeral Evidence, environmental law and future rights for non-human members of our community.
Featuring Cristina Hernandez, whose work focuses on the legal status of the Magdalena River in Colombia, Chromatic Agency, whose work responds to the illegal dumping of sewage by Southern Water and Renan Porto, who’s researching the relationship between First Nations peoples and ecology in Brazil.
Creative Resistance to Welfare State Violence
November 2022Toby will sharing some new work from his practice nnull in a lovely conversation with Healing Justice London!
The Deaths by Welfare Project investigates deaths linked to welfare reform and the violence of state austerity. Integral to this work is honouring, uplifting and learning from disabled people’s lived experience and resistance.
Creativity has been key to exposing and resisting the violence of the welfare state – as a political strategy to show the scale of harm, government accountability, and to name and remember those who have died.
Whitstable Biennale 2022
June 2022We are pleased to announce that our newest work Ephemeral Evidence / How does the sea see? will be on view at the latest installation of Whitstable Biennale this year! You’ll find us at 1 Red Lion Lane (around the corner from The Horsebridge Arts Centre).
In 2021, Southern Water faced a record £90m fine after pleading guilty to illegally discharging sewage that polluted rivers and coastal waters in Kent, Hampshire and Sussex. The case was the largest criminal investigation in the Environment Agency’s history. Over the course of six years, Southern Water were responsible for thousands of sewage discharges while deliberately presenting a misleading picture of compliance to the Environment Agency.
Ephemeral Evidence interrogates the rationale behind the crime: the calculation that it is better to risk a fine for polluting the ocean than it is to responsibly treat wastewater, and questions why a fictional construct (money) is more important for many decisions than objective reality (the health of the ocean). While money has a singular witness in the banking system, the ocean has many different ways of describing its existence. The film runs on loop alongside its counterpart How does the sea see? which is geared towards younger audiences. The film is accompanied with an interactive scuplture. Come visit and etch your testimony of the sea on our clay landscape!
