I am giving a keynote speech at Eavesdropping, the annual festival organised by Juliet Fraser. A review of the festival called it a “stand-out moment of the weekend.”

My talk, entitled Notes on Failure: Or Making Whilst Sick details my journey through and beyond cancer treatment, considering the ways it reformed and changed my practice as a composer.

“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place” (Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor)

I draw on the work of theorists Merleau-Ponty and Susan Sontag and artists Rebecca Horn, Henri Matisse and Frank Bowling to think through the ways in which disabled people use tools and technologies to make work.

I spoke to Juliet about this and many other topics on her Eavesdropping podcast embedded above.