The Predicament of the Pipeline is a performance lecture made in collaboration with artist Louis Pohl Koseda as part of an ongoing exploration of the UK’s planning system and its inherent complexity and contradiction. The performance was an attempt to elucidate on the layers of palimpsest that are present in government decision making processes, but also the layers of narrative that are presented in the painting.

Building on my research at the Design Museum, The Predicament of the Pipeline untangled the layers present in the current planning application process.

Using a new piece developed in collaboration by Louis Pohl Koseda as a backdrop. Using a narrative structure, soundscapes and live drawing I untangled the layers of bureaucracy to reveal the ways in which palimpsest defines the nature of policy and governance historically, and the impact this has on real life scenarios. 

A short poem submitted for issue four of Gather Zine.

The cracks are beginning to show in the structures that make up democracies all over the world. Steadfast democratic institutions are being undermined or wholly transformed. Shifting into a strange mercurial politics. A politics rooted in historical revisionism and the death of objectivity.

At the heart of this cultural battleground is a matter of historical revisionism, the rewriting of history. These are not just conversations about “how things were”, but instead, they are much more insidious. They are attempts at rewriting a national psyche.

Following on from her critically acclaimed book, The 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones joined us to offer a powerful lens on America’s current struggles around ideas of history, collective national identity and the politics of memory. 

A collaboration between Dutch platform DeDependance and The John Adams Institute we invited Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones to talk about her book The 1619 Project.

For this event, I curated and moderated the discussion in collaboration with DeDependance. 

PRAISE FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

The 2024/2025 Design Researchers in Residence set out to  respond to the theme of ‘Artificial’, questioning the limits of human-centred design in a more-than-human climate crisis. 

Situated in the the Design Museum’s Future Observatory, a research programme concerned with matters related to the green transition in partnership with the UKRI’s Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this year-long residency was particularly focussed on understanding the relationship between that which is ‘natural’ and that which is ‘human’.

Hot Mess looked to investigate the complexity and contradiction that is inextricable from the process of policy and decision-making in England. Using heat pumps as a case study, this project sought to map out the mechanisms of how policy is currently made, the current challenges in national and local planning policy and speculate an alternative way to make decisions that looks to learn from how nature deals with complexity and contradiction.


The process and outcomes of this research are on display at a free public exhbition at the Design Museum from 16th June to 21st September 2025. 

We are in an age of polycrisis, one that is characterised by a barrage of images of catastrophic environmental collapse, vast and mind-boggling wealth inequality, brutal and unrelenting genocidal campaigns and so much more. These images, projected to us through screens daily, have become the background noise to which we move through our daily lives. Stopping every now and then to consume, protest, or take a break on a sunny beach somewhere in search of a respite. When we think about this contemporary period we find ourselves in, critics often lay the blame squarely at the feet of modern capitalism.

But such critique often does not actively interrogate the idea of how our era has come to be defined by such catastrophic conditions. And though there isn’t such a thing as a single cause or solution to problems in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, a critical analysis of the methods and armature of modern capitalism demonstrates a harrowing realisation that this all par for the course, rather than the hijacking of an inherently benevolent system.

In her new book Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom Blakeley takes on the world’s most powerful corporations by showing how the causes of our modern crises are the intended result of our capitalist system. It’s not broken, it’s working exactly as planned.


Part of an ongoing collaboration with Dutch platform DeDependance,  we invited Grace Blakeley to speak about her book Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom.

For this event, I curated and moderated the discussion in collaboration with DeDependance. 

PRAISE FOR VULTURE CAPITALISM