I have been performing for 24 years. I play both alone and in collaboration with dancers, singers, weavers and computational artists.

When I am performing my solo material I sing my songs to explore the textures and pulses of the breath and nature and the heart. I am also fully attached to the poetry in song.

These songs of mine contain their arc and unfolding, but often hold elements of experimentation and improvisation, sometimes within the form, and sometimes not. I like pieces of them to shift and drift like a river in through the centre of the songtime.

I love to create material that can give me a really playful experience for my voice. I want to be loud and quiet and high and low and held and fizzy and tender and intense and cool and pointy. I also love to sing catchy melodies that feel good in the mouth.

My songs feel like colour to me – pinks (over the overlap) and reddish-browns (uluru song), sunset skies (in sleep) and dappled midsummer bluey-greys with points of amber (fractated). There are shiny many-hued greens like a forest (eros) or a single line of fierce yellow in the black (goddesses of grief).

I perform with pedals and objects/electronics. I use Pro Tools to sculpt my voice into beats and speckles, and I use a loop station to create harmonic layers. I use a contact mic’d mbira to build melodic accompaniment or to sing into, like a vocal filter. I create more juicy beats and sounds and sequences with the Korg Volcas, and the delay pedal is often used for rythmn and field resonance – whilst the reverb pedal can often become a tonal instrument.

As a young mother my work with improvised lullabies has become a starting point for recent expanded compositional work for solo and group voices.

I’ve been seen performing in the UK at venues such as The Vortex, Cafe Oto, The ICA, Iklectik, National Portrait Gallery, Purcell Room, Resonance FM, Whitstable Biennale, Sadler’s Wells, as well as abroad in Norway, Lithuania, France, Canada, Iceland, Berlin. Recent performances involve a lot of singing in nature and working with my voice groups out of doors.

https://portia.bandcamp.com/music a light sprinkling of sounds here!

Visual Creative Practice at Mother House Studios

Oils, Acrylics, Mobiles

Being creative in other ways as well as practicing singing and adds colour and flow to my days. Mother House has provided a way of spending the moments that make up this life more creatively amidst teaching work and full-time early motherhood, through the presence of community approaches to childcare in a creative environment. It’s truly a gift of a space. Below is a wee shadowy mobile made from tissue paper, paint, found leaves and light – I loved building this little structure, my three-year old son ran around the corridors whilst I fiddled with spiralling threads one Friday evening before the studio open day. At the open day we had a fantastic singing circle with artists, little ones, and visitors to the studio. Music-making is so immediate in a circle of voices – trained or untrained. My communities are a life support system for body and spirit. Many friends and creative colleagues are at Mother House integrated childcare and artist studios in Lewisham (as mentioned on a separate page). We are a collective of mothers and carers creating art and looking after our kids with the support of one another. My studio space here is where I have been working on oil and acrylic painting and multimedia installation pieces since July 2022. I also run a choir of voices here.