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Learning & Participation
Alex has over fifteen years experience working as a community artist, artist educator and tutor in a variety of educational settings, with hundreds of clients spanning an array of ages, abilities, social and cultural backgrounds. A passionate advocate of socially engaged arts practice, Alex has actively sought out opportunities to collaborate with various community groups, designing and delivering arts projects for various charities, NHS services, prisons, homeless shelters, refugee services, care homes, and various galleries, educational and community arts organisations. Alex has also taught in both mainstream schools and alternative education provisions, pupil referral units and youth services, and provided digital media training for various commercial enterprises. He has also run his own arts tutoring and mentoring business since 2015, working with both academic students and adult learners. Please refer to the clients section of the website for further information.
Alex takes great pride and reward in enabling individuals to explore their own creativity, particularly those who might experience barriers to participating in and engaging with creative opportunities, facilitating collaborative sessions aimed at developing their creative practice in a safe and supportive environment. He is especially passionate about working with marginalised groups in our society, dedicated to making access to arts and cultural activities available to all, and strongly believing in the transformative power of art to affect lives for the better.
A selection of projects and placements may be seen below. Alex has delivered numerous projects, workshops and learning activities for a host of clients, using his expertise in a variety of arts and digital media including; painting, drawing, collage/mixed media, photography, filmmaking, digital arts and animation. All projects are designed bespoke to the specific requirements of the commissioning organisation. For further information and enquiries, please contact the artist directly through the contact section of the website.
Selected Projects
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Holborn Community Association - 1A Arts
Alex worked with the young people of 1A Arts for three months, from April-July 2019. Working with a small group of 13-18 year olds, Alex designed and delivered a twelve two-hour session project in digital arts and motion graphics.
The project explored making processes in both 2D and digital media, investigating ways in which to cross over disciplines and bring to life drawings, paintings and mixed media works into digital animations and motion graphics. The young people were split into three groups, each producing their own collaborative digital art work through planning, scripting and storyboarding their own short animation, producing and digitising original 2D art works, editing digital art works in Adobe Photoshop, sourcing sound effects, and editing animations and motion graphics in Adobe After Effects. The three resulting videos were exhibited alongside original 2D art works at the Open Studios @ 1A Arts event, on 19th July 2019.
Creative Futures
Alex worked with groups of children at two West London primary schools, in a collaborative project between Creative Futures and West London Zone commencing in January 2019.
Working with 4-6 year old children at Oxford Gardens Primary School and 7-9 year olds at Burlington Danes Primary School, in the Ladbroke Grove and White City areas of London, Alex designed and delivered a series of one hour after-school sessions in a variety of media including; drawing, painting, word art, collage and sculpture. Each group worked towards creating a collaborative mural design for their school by combining their individual art works onto a large scale canvas, depicting their favourite things about the school.
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Reel Recovery
Alex spent a week in residence at First Take, a community filmmaking and digital arts organisation in Liverpool, working as a tutor on the Reel Recovery programme in January 2019.
Alex worked with group members on a vlogging project, helping each participant to research, write, film, record sound and edit video in Final Cut Pro the first vlog entry on their own personal vlogging channel, set up and broadcast on YouTube.
Surrey Clubs For Young People
Alex has worked with SCYP as an arts coach, consultant and curator since February 2018.
Facilitating arts workshops across 14 youth clubs in Surrey, Alex provided guidance and support to the young people participating in the inaugural ‘What’s Cool To You?’ countywide arts competition. Entrants created work in a variety of 2D, sculptural and digital media, culminating in an exhibition held at The Lighthouse gallery in Woking. Alex was a member of the judging panel appointed to co-curate the show, and award winners and runners-up prizes to young people at each youth club. He curated a second exhibition of the young people's work at the SCYP Volunteer Awards evening in March 2019, held at Surrey County Hall.
Alex continues to deliver arts activities at various SCYP youth clubs and is providing creative consultation and workshop facilitation for the latest arts competition programme, due to be held in the autumn of 2020.
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Community Focus
Alex has worked on numerous projects with Community Focus since 2012, first as an assistant artist before going on to design and deliver his own projects as lead artist for three projects in 2017. Alex has also been commissioned to produce both video and graphic design work for the charity.
As assistant artist Alex contributed to both the Outreach and ARTiculate programmes, working on visual arts, photography and storytelling projects. He provided sound recordings for the 'Desert Island Discs' programme delivered at various dementia and elderly mental health care homes across North London in 2017, capturing the stories and memories of their residents as they spoke about their favourite songs. For an ARTiculate creative writing project in 2016, Alex created graphic design projections of the participant's written work .
As lead artist Alex designed and delivered projects in photography and 'app art' at Northgate School at Edgware Community Hospital, a photography and scrapbook project at Clore Manor dementia care home, and a filmmaking project in collaboration with young service users at Barnet Refugee Service.
HEC Global Learning Centre
Alex was commissioned to produce a digital artwork telling the story of the 'Heartstone Odyssey', utilising the art and written works of children from five schools across the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
The project facilitated a dialogue between teachers and students from Years 4-7, using creative practice as a means of exploring, debating and discussing issues surrounding inequality, intolerance, prejudice and racism.
The commissioned work brings the children's creations to life in a 10 minute video, combining digital animations, motion graphics, sound effects and music. The work was screened alongside an exhibition of the original artworks at Tower Hamlets City Hall in June 2017.
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Sydenham High School
Alex has been a visiting tutor since 2015, invited to teach four two-hour workshops 2-3 times per academic year on the school's co-curricular & enrichment programme.
Working with groups of around twenty students from Years 10-12 Alex has delivered a range of workshops, using digital photography as the basis for exploration into wider digital arts practice such as graphic design and digital storytelling. Students are introduced to different types of photography, composition techniques and camera modes, before putting their learning into practice taking photographs around the school grounds and in neighbouring Crystal Palace Park. They are then invited to create digital artworks from their photographs back in the classroom, with Alex providing further tuition in software such as Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro to create their final pieces.
STRETCH
Alex became an arts practitioner with STRETCH in 2015. Delivering digital storytelling projects for the three-year Big Lottery funded 'STRETCH Digital' project, Alex worked with offenders and vulnerable groups in prisons and marginalised communities. Aimed at bridging the 'digital divide' between society and the prison population while providing a platform to have their voice heard, the project also aimed to build confidence and self-esteem, and to provide skills that could be utilised upon release. Working with participants to produce a script, storyboard and voiceover recording together with photographs and original visual artworks, these were then edited together using an iPad to create a 2-3 minute video. These were screened at prisons in celebratory events among participant's peers, as well as at various exhibitions, conferences and events held across the country over the course of the programme.
Completing a week's residency in Southern France learning the art of digital storytelling from pioneering practitioner and Creative Narrations founder member Natasha Freidus, Alex went on to deliver projects at HMP Bronzefield, HMP Thameside and HMP Peterborough. He also worked with residents at Caritas Anchor House homeless shelter in East London, and with ex-offenders at Prisoners' Education Trust. Over the course of the programme Alex co-produced almost thirty digital stories, while also being independently commissioned to create several short films in collaboration with partners including; Abel & Cole, Caritas Anchor House, Catalyst In Communities, Central Saint Martins, Design Against Crime, Kiss My Art, Makeright Design Academy, People's Health Trust, Power Programme, and Prisoners' Education Trust.
In addition to his work on the STRETCH Digital programme Alex also ran the Stories of Chrisp Street heritage project, capturing the personal histories and legacies of local residents in the face of rapid gentrification of the neighbourhood. The digital stories created over the course of the project were screened at Brownfield Community Cabin in Poplar, East London, in April 2017.
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King's College London /
South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust
Alex has been involved with several collaborative projects since 2013, working with various groups of service users in mental health and addictions services.
Alex worked with service users at Blackfriars and Lambeth community drug and alcohol teams, providing guidance and support to individuals attending weekly arts and crafts classes. Alex also contributed to the development of the SLaMAdArt group, facilitating participant-led practice and coordinating collaborations and exhibitions held by the group, most notably for the 'FLOW' creative event held at Tate Modern in 2014, in celebration of World Mental Health Day. He also helped to produce and curate work and design marketing materials for the 'SLaMAdArt: 10 Years in Process' retrospective exhibition at Maudsley Long Gallery in 2015.
Alex has been commissioned for various partnership projects between King's College and SLaM, among them contributing arts direction, consultation and design work for the 'Physical Health and Wellbeing Handbook for Service Users and Carers' publication in 2014, and designing and delivering a six-week 'visual art diary' project on the Leo Ward, an early interventions inpatient ward at The Ladywell Unit, Lewisham Hospital. The project aimed to contribute towards research into service user and staff attitudes towards the Trust's newly implemented no-smoking legislation on hospital grounds, through visual journaling workshops and contributions to a group canvas.
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