Before the award, I was working nine-day fortnights at the architecture office, with my one spare day used to chip away at my own projects. It was a balance that felt safe but ultimately limited – allowing me to maintain a modest income while only gradually working towards the possibility of an independent practice. Being awarded the Fellowship gave me the confidence to pursue that ambition of my own interdisciplinary practice directly. The financial support alleviated some of the precarity associated with ‘going it alone’, but just as significantly, the recognition had a transformative emotional impact.
It affirmed that the way I was working across architecture, art, and construction had value. Although I trained and qualified as an architect, I had long felt that conventional architectural practice was not fully suited to my creative ambitions. Alongside my professional experience in offices, I had been developing a parallel body of work of photographic projects, installations, pavilions, events and making collaborations – work that gave me permission to care about a tangible world of people and materials, approached with an energy that didn’t have a clear framework or sense of legitimacy.
Instead, the Fellowship allowed me to recognise these strands not as peripheral, but as central to my practice. It gave me permission to take a multidisciplinary approach seriously, and to pursue it with greater confidence and intent.
Over the past year, this shift has translated into a wide range of activity. I’ve been given opportunities to better establish my own creative voice: I designed the exhibition for the Design Researchers in Residence programme at the Design Museum and also created the album artwork for deathcrash’s third album, ‘Somersaults’. The design and build studio Flimsy Works that I co-founded and co-direct was included on New Architects 5 (a definitive index compiled by the Architecture Foundation of the UK’s best new architects). We designed and built a camp kitchen for the Knepp Estate, threw a brûlée party as part of our fabrication work with the Design Museum, delivered an off-grid cabin in a rural valley in Wales and ran a programme with Cement Fields supporting local young people to explore the circular economy through the building of a pop-up pavilion made from waste.
The Fellowship enabled me to invest directly on materials for my practice, such as camera equipment and books. I was able to take on projects as Flimsy Works (as opposed to as a solo practitioner) by funding my own time on it with the award and allocating the project fee to my colleagues at Flimsy instead. I reduced my hours at the office I worked at in order to develop my own projects – even when there weren’t projects lined up, having the breathing space and time to do the background administrative tasks associated with running a practice allowed me to build up my platform with far greater intention. I later was able to take a sabbatical from my main job, during which I dedicated myself fully to coordinating the construction of a Flimsy-designed cabin and building it with my bare hands, gaining a set of skills that I otherwise could have never had access to.
During this sabbatical, I was also able to critically reflect on my career. Supplemented with the residency at the Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking, this period allowed me to properly engage with the literature that underpins my practice. I worked through a substantial number of texts, making notes and beginning to draw connections between long-standing influences and emerging interests. This process of slowing down, revisiting what has shaped my work and asking where it might go next, felt both grounding and expansive. It enabled me to begin articulating a more coherent critical position for my practice.
The Fellowship has enabled me to move from a cautious, incremental approach to a more committed and self-defined path. It has supported not only the work I have produced, but the conditions in which I can continue to develop it – providing time, space, and belief at a critical moment. I now feel equipped to build a long-term practice that operates meaningfully across architecture, art, and construction, and to do so with confidence in its value.