Shakeel Marham
Shakeel Marham
Shakeel works with performance and digital imaging
Shakell Marham
Shakeel has worked with the Shadowlight Artist on group productions since 2017.
Credits
Shadowlight group productions featuring Shakeel Marham
Wendy Belcher
Wendy Belcher
Wendy Belcher is interested in performing for camera
Wendy Belcher
Wendy joined the group as a participant in group projects, and produced her first solo project during LUMINOUS, building these experiences with Things that Annoy Me. More recently her work has begun to draw on her personal experience of loss.
“When the project started, everything was fine. Then lockdown. I had to just wait–weeks, months. If it wasn’t for lockdown, I could have done things quickly– all of it. Done.”
Credits
Script: Wendy Belcher
Performer: Wendy Belcher
Artwork: Shadowlight Artists
Category
Abul Kasem
Abul Kasem
Associate Abul Kasem in interseted in camera and direction
Abul Kasem
Shadowlight Abul Kasem is interested in camera direction, and also enjoys performing. He has worked on three group productions with the Shadowlights since 2015, most recently Landscapes.
Credits
Photos by: Richard Duriez
Category
Sophie Henderson
Sophie Henderson
Associate Sophie Henderson is an actor and performer
Sophie Henderson
Newly recruited Shadowlight Associate Sophie Henderson is an actor and performer. She has previously appeared on BBC Televisions’ Casualty series, and provided the voiceover performance for the 2017 Shadowlight group production L.R.R.H.
Credits
Photos by: Richard Duriez
Category
Mark Hemsworth
Mark Hemsworth
Mark Hemsworth works with landscape, photography and film
Mark Hemsworth
Mark Hemsworth was born in 1968 in Reading and grew up in Cholsey, Oxfordshire with his family. Mark has a very broad base in the visual arts: he is a skilled draughtsman and accomplished watercolourist whose interests in recent years have shifted towards photography, film and video. He is particularly passionate about walking and the landscape.
Mark is an obsessive photographer, taking thousands of images annually on his photography walks. He is particularly interested in nature and landscape, aviation, and large-scale events. During the earlier Shadowlight project RISING, Mark began to experiment with the potential of collaging large numbers of photographs into large-scale digital prints, which he continued to explore during LUMINOUS.
Mark teamed up with a new collaborator, photographer and lecturer John Blythe for LUMINOUS. Mark had planned to travel to more remote locations to create series of images to combine into composite digital images showing the changes in lighting conditions across most of a daylight period, and create a film about his working process. The advent of the pandemic made this original plan impossible, due to the need for isolation and limitations of travel.
Mark modified his plan and decided to focus on amassing large collections of themed images, which he carried out independently. These were then assembled in collage grids, organising the images according to colour and composition to create overarching compositions across the grid.
“I found it difficult, particularly at the start, in March and April. I still managed to get out for walks and cycle rides. It was more difficult to get to distant places, for the longer walks.
In my photography, I’m doing mainly sunset photographs and collaging them to get the colours to run together. My project changed a lot. We weren’t able to do so much of the filming, it was mainly photography. The original plan was to go somewhere a long way away for a walk, but with Covid I haven’t been able to do that. I’ve been working with John Blythe to make collages over Skype. Originally I had planned to take photographs as the light changed through the day, but that wasn’t possible. It’s made me feel not so happy. I miss not being able to do the original plans, but I hope to do it when it’s all over once Covid has gone.”
Credits
Author: Mark Hemsworth
Filmmaker: Naomi Morris
Category
Russell Highsmith
Russell Highsmith
Russell Highsmith writes for stage and screen
Russell Highsmith
Russell Highsmith was born in Oxford in 1985, and lives in Abingdon. He has been writing for the screen for the past 10 years, and is captivated by TV sitcoms from the 1970s and ‘80s.
I was 16 weeks premature and that was the cause of my disability, I have right-sided hemiplegia. I have spent my whole life in Abingdon apart from three years when I was a student at Treloar College in Alton, Hampshire. I have always been interested in comedies and making people laugh. I like the ‘old’ comedies that were on TV like The Vicar of Dibley and Only Fools and Horses. I like the fact that they have audience laughter in them because it almost gives you permission to laugh at them or with them.
Building on his previous writing and direction projects, Russell has expanded his writing from short film scripts into long-form work. He has developed a script for a play which culminated in a theatrical performance of the work The Big Shock in February 2016. The play draws on the genres of romantic comedy and drama, and at times offers an unsettling view of young relationships. Russell developed the piece in collaboration with playwright and producer Mark Ralph-Bowman.
Singles Night is a Russell’s lastest play. It is a full-length lively and thought provoking romantic comedy play, which was performed by professional actors over two nights to a sold-out audiences (with high proportion of people with learning disabilities), at the Old Fire Station Theatre in Oxford on 19th & 20th September 2018. The 1hr and 40 minute production was film and can be found on the groups Youtube Channel. There is also a short “writer’s profile” video that documents Russell’s work through the writing, rehearsal and performance of Singles Night.
Credits
Author: Russell Highsmith
Dramatist: Mark Ralph-Bowman
Category
Richard Hunt
Richard Hunt
Richard Hunt works in painting and installation
Richard Hunt
Richard Hunt was born in 1972 in Plymouth, and grew up in Gibraltar. He now lives in Rose Hill in Oxford. Richard is a prolific painter, who in 2017 won the Shape Open Award with work produced during the Creative Bridges project. Much of Richard’s earlier work is based around painting, and reflects his interest in popular cul-ture blended with his identification of the act of painting as a devotional activity. He has been working in collaboration with artist Sonia Boué for the past four years, and this partnerhsip has helped Richard to develop his self-taught technique and work on a larger scale in the context of a professional studio environment.
After winning the Shape Open, Richard decided to expand his practice to embrace elements of sculpture and textured surfaces. Continuing his successful collaboration with Sonia during the LUMINOUS project, Richard had planned to created an installation which was to have been an enclosed space influenced by Egyptian temple and tomb design, with wall friezes created using digital enlargements of his paintings. Richard had already begun working towards this goal with longtime collaborator Sonia Boué when the pandemic hit. As a result, Richard changed direction to focus on the paintings which he carried out largely independently with remote support from Sonia.
“I like all of the paintings. It’s one of my strong points now. Ocean of the Dragon is one of my favourites. I like the ocean. Anything to do with water is still my favourite thing. It keeps my spirit going, it keeps my blood going. It’s the best work so far. It’s nice to do my own work, I’ve got my confidence back.
It’s a bit different working on my own. I thought I couldn’t cope at first, but I could quite happily do it on my own. It’s nice to have a bit of company sometimes.”
Credits
Paintings: Richard Hunt
Filmmaker: Sonia Boué
Composer: Sara Lowes
Category
Tom Breach
Tom Breach
Tom Breach is 26, lives in Oxford and has Asperger’s. His drawings create strange scenarios where morality and social norms are suspended. Following on from his first project with the group, Revenge of the Penguin, his new film Shoebox Bay explores gender identity issues alongside the misadventures of individuals adrift in an uncaring world, all approached through black humour. The dark comedy in his work often draws on personal experience and reflects his views of injustices in society.
The writing of Shoebox Bay was completed by February 2020, but most of the production took place during the UK’s national lockdown, with Tom collaborating with editor Chris Oakley via Skype and exchanging production drawings via the post. Animated sections were then shared online and discussed via Skype, allowing Tom to remotely retain artistic control of the project.
Credits
Animation and Drawings by: Tom Breach
“I have a shoe fetish, so I enjoy wearing women’s shoes around the home. I don’t wear them out in public, because Covid or no Covid, homophobic people will
bully the heck out of a man in women’s clothing. Traditionalists pick on people who are not adhering to their gender stereotypes.
Maybe the idea of making a film about shoe fetish is partially to raise awareness, and hopefully people will understand it’s ok to have a shoe fetish. Even with Covid gone, prejudice, the rich/poor divide, capitalism, corruption, they will still be here.
Bullies will still be in the world.”
Lucy Skuce
Lucy Skuce
Lucy Skuce works with video and installation
Lucy Skuce
Lucy Skuce was born in 1981 in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and grew up in Worcestershire. She lives in Didcot, Oxfordshire. Lucy is an artist and filmmaker who was born with profound and multiple disabilities. She bought her first VHS camcorder as a young woman and started to film her life, including the objects and places she identifies as important. Her work in film has been screened both within the UK and internationally, including at Liberty Festival (National Film Theatre BFI (Southbank), and Abilities Festival (Toronto).
Since working as part of the Shadowlight group, her interests have expanded to working in media other than film, and in recent years Lucy has increasingly embraced sculpture and installation. Lucy’s project for LUMINOUS returned to a recurrent theme in her work, the now-demolished Didcot power station, which dominated the landscape of her home town for decades. Blue Didcot A Power Station is her most ambitious project to date, incorporating a
model railway, CCTV and sound systems alongside a scale recreation of the iconic cooling towers, rendered in a uniform blue colour. The piece had to be completed during lockdown, which necessitated some modifications.
New working methods were devised allowing Lucy to remotely oversee the fabrication of the installation in close-up via Skype. Lucy said of working on her project in lockdown:
“It’s been fantastic. [Working on Skype] has been cool– it’s good. I made my 50Hz hum soundtrack at home.
Last year I went out in the car– before the lockdown. I went to visit the cooling towers and saw them come down. The cooling towers are gone now. I visited
the turbine hall before it was shut down as well. It was noisy. I had to wear ear defenders.”
Credits
Author: Lucy Skuce
Category
Danny Smith
Danny Smith was born in Wallingford in 1975 where he grew up, he now lives in Oxford.
Danny Smith has diverse and long-standing interests in performance, film, photography, and painting and drawing. Danny has clear artistic intentions:
to show independence and demonstrate emotions associated with change and personal empowerment. Danny identifies pride in being a role model
for other disabled people seeking an independent life. His work in painting, photography and video has been exhibited within the UK and internationally.
For LUMINOUS, Danny wanted to produce another dance for camera film exploring memories in comparison to his current circumstances. In part, he
wanted to explore some of his past experiences of being bullied as a result of having Downs Syndrome. Danny chose to collaborate with choreographer
Anna Watkins to create the dance piece, alongside filmmaker Nicola Josse.
Flashback was originally developed as a studio-based production involving a small ensemble, but this had to be adapted as a solo piece in the light of Covid restrictions.
In December 2020, Flashback won Best Dance Film at the Together! 2020 Disability Film Festival.During the lockdown, Danny produced a large quantity of collage work and an installation piece supported by Cait Sweeney. Danny said of lockdown:
“I quite like it, actually. I like to work indoors in the lockdown– it helps keep your mind fresh, there is peace and quiet. It’s more concentrated.
I quite enjoyed rehearsing outside. It helped me explore different feelings. I think it changed my life– it made me feel more strongly what I am. This lockdown has made me focused on what I am.
I enjoyed going to Swindon. [Anna] was calm and gentle– I think I picked the right
lady.
I missed all my socialising. I missed going around the town. I find it hard to be stuck indoors. I like trying to be more social. I do find it hard. I go online lots and see what people have been up to.”
Flashback by Danny Smith
Author/Dancer: Danny Smith
Choreographer: Anna Watkins
Camera: Miguel Mocho