There’s one moment in my career so far that really stands out. I was playing a suicidal mermaid in a shell bra in a five week production of an experimental Christmas art show in Margate. The first few nights were very quiet – but then word got out that there was this odd show with a werefox and a fortune teller and that at 7.45pm I (a terminally depressed mermaid) would sing on the bandstand in Margate. We’d spent most of our budget on a snow machine, but in the end it snowed every night anyway. The shell bra was an unforgiving choice in light of that. 

Years later I was at a roundtable at the Turner, where I was talking about the impact of art within communities. An attendee, an older woman, began talking about art that she’d seen and how it changed her perspective. “There was this one show I saw years and years ago”, she said, “and one particular image from it has stayed with me ever since: a mermaid, singing on a bandstand in a shell bra.” I was obviously delighted and told her, “that was me!” She was shocked and said, “as you get older you can't keep every moment, so you find memories become cameos. That show - you - are a cameo in my life. It will always stay with me.” I was mind blown. It reminded me of what I love most about art and theatre – the connections that this one outrageous idea created. It became one of my proudest moments.

I think that’s what I value most about my work, past and present – meeting so many people, making connections, finding people to make brilliant ideas come to life. There has been nothing traditional about my path; the career trajectory is scattergun. After Uni, I trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama as an actor. I spent my twenties acting in small shows and going to auditions, which I funded with music journalism. I then started making theatre and live art with some friends (including my now-husband Eoin) under the name Dot Dash. Eoin and I then moved to Margate to run the Tom Thumb Theatre and I started working curating and producing at festivals alongside that. I trained as a yoga instructor between having our two children and started running a night called Heavy Breathing doing yoga to drone metal; I also ran gong baths under the name Gong Grrrl. At one time I edited a paper called the Margate Mercury; I was an associate artist at Open School East for a while, too. 

I learned early on that if you have an idea, no matter how big or small, you just have to ask – or get creative with how to make it happen. I once curated a really small festival in Canterbury that was all about projections and by the end of it, we had Yoko Ono involved. Another time, when I was working for an amazing company that I can only describe as the intersection of architecture and the circus, I was tasked with things like finding a bus for a clown who was in the South of France. There’s always a way.

That’s basically the driving skill (and what I enjoy) about my job now – problem solving, and making relationships and connections. Maybe because I’ve worked across so many different industries, I’m lucky to have met so many interesting people with so much talent over the years. I genuinely like chatting with people. Recently work has taken me in many more directions, developing innovative projects like Visualising AI with Google DeepMind alongside artists and animators to reimagine AI and begin to break down stereotypes within it – I’ve been proud to see that unfold. There’s such diversity to enjoy – one day it might be developing a quiz to communicate complex discovery research about the climate and mental health with Wellcome Trust; the next I'm learning about antibodies and the working lives of scientists on a project with Abcam.

There really is so much more to do and learn, which is probably what fuels me. Next I hope to take on more challenging projects, and bring more unlikely ideas to life. Right now there are no imminent plans to sit on the bandstand in Margate, singing in the snow dressed as a mermaid. But you never know.