In 2004, I co-founded Black Dogs with five other Leeds Based Artists. Black Dogs is an arts collective that explores themes of work and play, which publishes and organises events in Yorkshire and throughout the UK.



Although I am no longer a member, the group is still active and for a fuller archive of activities as well as upcoming events can be found at their website, www.black-dog.org. This page is not about archiving my activities within the group, but making clear the impact that being a member has had on my thinking and artistic practice.



Firstly it taught me the importance and advantages of collaborative art making. Secondly it made me question what Art is and specifically what an art object is, which lead me to start thinking about the possibilities of art making as performance and of interactive/ usable sculptures rather than finished dead objects. Thirdly, making the unmissable golf course for Consequences, 2006, (unmssable in the sense that you could not miss rather than it being the most amazing thing in the word ever) was my starting point for considering notions of landscape as a subject for investigation. 



I left unofficially left Black Dogs in 2007 after I undertook a long research trip to Canada in order to study Canadian Landscape and Genre Art. Black Dogs had been successful was because it was about a group of people were having in depth discussions about art, life and the politics of everyday life. Due to the geographic difficulties and a divergence of artistic and personal interests, my input into the groups activities waned from this point onwards. For more examples of the work i made with Black Dogs, to find out more about Black Dogs activities, past and present please visit website www.black-dogs.org