People
We are interested in a form of dialogue which is based on deep listening, empathy, empowerment.
Melissa Appleton
Creative Associate
Melissa Appleton is an artist, producer and creative director. With a background in architecture, Melissa’s work responds to place – combining environments, live events, sound and other elements into an expanded form of sculpture. Working in South Wales since 2015, Melissa’s work has focused on developing cultural programmes with community, land and environmental partners. She has worked as a creative producer on projects such as Hinterlands Wales, an arts and ecology programme for the Monmouthshire & Brecon Canal and Skyline, a feasibility study for the large-scale transfer of land to community groups in the South Wales Valleys.
Melissa was a visiting lecturer at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University, 2011–2019 and has taught art and architecture at Royal College of Art, London, The Bartlett, UCL and Nottingham University. Melissa is currently Interim Creative Director at Peak, in the Black Mountains, Wales.
Owen Griffiths
Founder and Director
Founder and Director of Ways of Working, Owen Griffiths is an artist, workshop leader and facilitator. Using participatory and collaborative processes, his socially engaged practice explores the possibilities of art to create new frameworks, resources and systems. This takes many forms, but includes reclaiming and rethinking events, rituals and spaces of dialogue through making gardens, codesigning spaces, curating events and making feasts. Owen explores climate, landscape, urbanism, social justice, food systems and pedagogy, creating projects and events that prepare us for the work of the future.
Isabel Griffin
Creative Associate
Isabel Griffin has 30 years’ experience of working across the voluntary and statutory sectors in roles relating to: social and cultural justice, co-operative education and facilitation, creative and cultural participation, community engagement and inclusion, research, evaluation and policy development.
These varied but overlapping roles have enabled her to develop a rich and extensive skill set. Her freelance practice is holistic and she works across different disciplines combining Creative Production, Project Management, Community Engagement and Legacy, Evaluation and Social Policy. Isabel works as a creative producer with artist Marc Rees on multi platform large and small scale projects, with Owen on research projects and socially engaged works, and is developing other work in community settings across the UK and Europe.
Sam Makumba
Creative Associate
Sam Makumba is a Ugandan artist and teacher living in England. He is a trained educator specialising in Art & Design, and has taught in secondary schools in Uganda and graduated from Bradford University with a BA in Art, Design & Craft. He has worked directly with young people with additional needs at Ruskin Mill College, where he specialises in ceramics. Additionally, he teaches sculpture at schools and community projects. Sam has an MA in Social Sculpture from Oxford Brookes, and set up Dewe Project, which works with those who are not able to access this kind of education in Uganda. He is a prolific builder and teacher, with a pedagogy specialising in oven making and creative community projects.
Kristian Byskov & Margarita del Carmen
Creative Associates
Kristian Byskov and Margarita del Carmen work as artists and facilitators with radical engagement of community groups, where emphasis is put on local resources and organisation. At the core of this is an aim to activate spaces of learning. Important elements are collaboratively designing and crafting common spaces. They have a focus on the relation between the particular situations of communities and their surrounding ecology, history and broader infrastructures. They are engaged in a critical discourse around rights to land, how spaces are formed and how spaces in themselves contain negotiations and struggles of power. We see this project as an open process and collaborate within an interdisciplinary network.
Fern Thomas
Board Member & Creative Associate
Fern Thomas is an artist whose practice explores myth-making, folk magic and folk healing, and the need for new rituals. Her work explores archetypal images, pedagogical spaces and inner landscapes, creating works rooted in a connection to nature, its rhythms and place. Most recently, Fern has returned to the principles of Social Sculpture, seeking out connections with citizenship, civic spaces, play and ‘making kin’, imagining them as tools for how we collectively respond to and live in climate breakdown.
Rhian Jones
Board Member & Creative Associate
Rhian Jones is an artist, maker and creative producer, having worked at a senior level in the arts in Wales and England for over 25 years. She focuses on creative learning, community regeneration and organisational development, most recently setting up the Arts & Education Network for Mid and West Wales. A sense of place, culture and language is at the core of Rhian’s work, engaging people with projects, encouraging ownership and creating safe spaces to explore. Cymraeg, the Welsh language and culture, is at the root of her way of working.
Beau W Beakhouse & Sadia Pineda Hameed
Creative Associates
Beau W Beakhouse and Sadia Pineda Hameed are a collaborative duo based in Cardiff, Wales whose practice dramatises, reconstructs and reenacts autonomous and alternate futures. Their work often takes the form of speculation, resistance and site-building at the intersection of performance and installation. In particular they continuously engage with text and the archive, undoing and disassembling relationships between language and colonialism; and unfolding processes of decay and disassembly as alternatives to western models of preservation. They look to revivification, working against the static categories of institutional models. Together they also run LUMIN, a print, radio and curatorial collective based in Wales.
Stevie MacKinnon-Smith
Creative Associate
Stevie MacKinnon-Smith is a writer and producer working in the arts and architecture between London and South Wales. Her practice explores the ways in which art and writing can be useful in bringing forth new modes of being outside of traditional models of critique and philosophical inquiry. This includes a focus on speculation, manifestation, non-philosophy, radical imagination and fiction, and takes the form of essays, exhibition texts and art writing. Stevie is currently studying an MA in Contemporary Art Theory in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Sahar Qawasmi
Creative Associate
Sahar Qawasmi is an architect restorer and co-founder of Sakiya – Art | Science | Agriculture with Nida Sinnokrot. She is dedicated to protecting, (re)claiming, and (re)building different forms of common structures and infrastructures, challenging and reconfiguring private ownership and isolating social practices. She engages with collective, environmental, and feminist methodologies of learning and unlearning to cultivate space for a wider ecology of knowledge.
Jonathan Arndell
Creative Associate
Jonathan Arndell trained at the Architectural Association, London and has been a registered architect since 1978. He has worked extensively across South Wales for many different clients including Housing Associations and Women’s Aid groups. In 1996 he set up his own company, Collaborative Designs Ltd., where he continued to specialise in the renovation and conversion of old buildings, special needs housing and community-based feasibility studies.
Between September 2015 and May 2017 Jonathan studied on the Foundation Art and Design course at the Swansea College of Art. This led to his interest in the visual arts and then subsequently, after his first visit to Palestine in October 2015, to the development of connections between Wales and Palestine through the medium of his arts and architectural practice.
Denise Kwan
Creative Associate
Dr. Denise Kwan is an artist, researcher and writer. With a background in sculpture and curating, her practice explores the interdisciplinary crossovers between migration, material culture, social practice and ethnography. The creation of alternative spaces and communities through making is a reccurring theme.
Working with ideas of embodiment in the context of the Chinese diaspora, her PhD research at the University of Westminster explored the use of social practice and material culture with two generations of British Chinese women (2019) to create a bi-lingual Cantonese English art school at Haringey Chinese Community Centre.
Denise has been particularly interested in the potential of community building through art making where the work typically arises in domestic, community and digital spaces. In response to the anti-asian racism incited by Covid-19, she facilitated a series of digital zine making workshops entitled ‘A Zine of Collective Care’. She is co-founder of the East and Southeast Asian collective Sunday.