In addition to our Creative Heritage Producer and Writer in Residence, Natalie McGrath, we are delighted to work with a number of other LGBTQ+ artists. Their work will explore otherwise hidden or obscured aspects of the RAMM’s collections to reveal LGBTQ+ heritage.
Charice Bhardwaj is a performance-maker, writer and mover based in Exeter. She has a love for devising new work and attempting to explore often vast contemporary topics in intimate, collective and darkly humorous ways. Starting from the personal to speak to the political, previous and current projects deal with racism, food, ageing, touch. Over the past few years, she has been interested in expanding her movement practice, fascinated by the freedom and authenticity of the untrained body when given permission to play. Her solo clown show Hot Neck Pink, which debuted as partof Camden People’s Theatre’s queer scratch festival 2018, explored without dialogue the awkwardness and joy of discovering your bisexuality. After graduating from the University of Exeter in Drama in 2019, she stayed to make work in the South West and pursue a part-time MA in Theatre Practice. Her MA project is a playfully historical solo about British imperialism in Devon. Charice is the Youth Practitioner at Beyond Face theatre, and has recently worked with Quirk Theatre, Mothers Who Make, Spork! Poetry, and Beyond Face Ensemble. She hopes to continue a wild cabaret about NHS nurses after Covid, and she is delighted to be working on Queering the Museum to look at how objects might speak back to power.
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT CHARICE’S AND CARINA’S WORK ON THE PROJECT!
Rushaa Louise Hamid (she/her) is a socio-political researcher, writer, and poet living in East London. Her work centres on identity tensions in the modern world, and draws from her Sudanese and British heritage and upbringing straddled between the two countries. In particular she enjoys taking a multi-disciplinary approach to exploring issues of race, culture, queerness, and disability using digital formats alongside more traditional mediums. Her writing has appeared in places such as Buzzfeed, the Independent, Dazed, and Rooted in Rightsamongst others and she maintains an online dashboard project, visually exploring the cliché question “but where are you really from?” which plagues people coded as other. Currently she works as the Research Manager at a national institution, guiding people on how to study and find solutions to problems impacting their communities and – on top of her work for Out and About – is also developing an interactive digital project about disability. She can be found on her website or over on Twitter @thesecondrussia.
Sachal Khan is an emerging writer based in Exeter using poetry and manipulated sound to explore history embedded within memory. By picking apart separate sounds, memories, and moments before stitching them together, they hope to explore the disruptive experiences within migration and transness. In 2020, under the mentorship of Rikki Beadle-Blair, Sachal wrote a monologue that will be published in Blair’s upcoming anthology LIT! alongside other emerging writers of colour. They are also working with a small group of programmers, artists, and musicians on a narrative video game exploring loneliness, failure, and online friendship.
Carina Miles is an emerging actor, performer and devisor based in the South West. She is currently working as a Participation Worker for a young people’s mental health organisation. Carina values the arts as a transformative process and her passion to create social change and access to the arts derives from her experience as a Youth and Community Worker. As a gay woman she has worked to create change where LGBTQ+ lives and histories are more visible. Carina has been involved in local theatre companies, worked as a musician and artist for many years and is currently studying for her Masters in Theatre Practice at the University of Exeter, graduating this summer. Carina focuses on working with psycho-physical movement and voice processes, along with the place of objects in performance practice. Her research focuses upon solo performance and exploring “object entanglements” through post humanistic perspectives and object orientated philosophies. Her most recent work “The Armchair” devised by Carina was performed by her at The Ideas Lab at the Theatre Royal Plymouth in December 2019. Carina is excited to apply these concepts on queering the objects and what might occur if say, a remote control identified as a lesbian?!
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT CARINA’S AND CHARICE’S WORK ON THE PROJECT!
Caleb Parkin is a day-glo queero techno eco poet, performer and facilitator, based in Bristol. He won second prize in the National Poetry Competition 2016, first in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2017, and has placed in various other competition shortlists. He has poems published in The Rialto, Poetry Review, Under the Radar, Butcher’s Dog, Coast to Coast to Coast, Strix, Magma, Envoi, Lighthouse and elsewhere. Commissions include: Poetry Society, Lyra Festival, Green Party, Knowle West Media Centre and The Hepworth Wakefield. He tutors for Poetry Society, Poetry School and First Story and (usually) hosts groups in settings from schools, to museums, residential care homes, science centres and festival yurts. In 2019, he completed an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (CWTP) through Metanoia Institute, with a dissertation focused on CWTP in museum and gallery settings. Currently, he’s developing his first collection exploring queer ecopoetry and ecosexualities, supported by Arts Council Developing Your Creative Practice. Before turning fully to poetry, Caleb worked in BBC TV and Radio, production and as a teacher and Senior Inclusion Worker in schools and Pupil Referral Units. He is a professional member of Engage, NAWE (National Association of Writers in Education), Lapidus International: Words for Wellbeing, and a Fellow of the RSA (FRSA).
Shiri Shah is a poet and lyrical essayist, born and raised in London. She dedicates her artistic practice to unearthing mythical histories, and abstracting the distinction between the non/human and the un/natural. After receiving her Masters in Comparative Literature and Philosophy at Goldsmiths in 2019, she began to write creatively after a surreal experience at a wedding. Shirine is also an experienced makeup artist, performer, and host. She was recently long listed for Spread The Word’s Life Writing Prize in 2020, and is currently writing her debut novel on the luxury retail dystopia. Her most recent project dives into the fractured and contradictory process of translation and documentation within family and poetry. You can find her on twitter @_shirishah.
Oren Shoesmith is a writer and artist using text, sound and performance to explore volatile and abject masculinity. Often working with messy materials such as raw clay, spit, water and lubricants, he looks at overlaps between embodied horror, humour and erotics to articulate a chaotic trans and queer subjectivity. Oren uses agitated biblical and mythological narratives to articulate systems of power and violence as a generative method of exploring grief, trauma and authority. These narratives are often upheld by ritualised processes which occur in transitory spaces such as toilets, bathrooms, moors, night clubs and bodies of water. A recent performance entitled The greatest gift my father ever gave me was how to make my limbs from clay, emerged from oral and virtual traditions of knowledge sharing in trans communities. In the performance, a DIY phallic prosthetic is created out of unconventional organic materials. This act is a practical and poetic way of engaging, re-enacting and disrupting a symbolic and spiritual sense of the Father as well as developing a new, personal creation myth. He is currently based in Reading where he’s involved in building queer spaces where they are currently lacking through arts collective Double Okay. The collective programme experimental performance and cabaret nights as a point of resistance in a post-gentrified commuter town.