About
Caitlin Shepherd
“To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.”
︎ Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie- maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”
︎ Mark Fisher, 2009, p.19
“It seems that there are at least two ways of thinking of listening in terms of political action: listening together with others in order to become aware of your own conditions…and listening as a willingness to change them through collective effort. The willingness can be actualised in terms of political organising, protesting or simply getting involved in some kind of social struggle…”
︎ Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, 2017,p.21
Allo allo! I don’t know how you got here but thank you for taking the time to find out a little more - for being curious. So, a little bit about me.
What can I say… in an attempt to locate myself in the complex realities we find ourselves living and working within, I will briefly situate myself - a la situated feminisms.
I’m a cis gendered woman, grown in a small, low-income single mother family, with an absent American father called Randy. My mum, my twin brother and I moved around a lot growing up. We didn’t have a lot of money, (raising twins as a single mum is hardcore), but mum was big into valuing reading, creativity and education. So, while we didn’t have a car, TV, etc etc, I’ve always felt supported and encouraged to let my mind go off on one; to let myself follow the scent, if you will.
I’m a multi-disciplinary artist, researcher and educator, with side hustles often on the go. I work in mixed media and amongst other things, use print design, film and photography collage, sound and auto-theoretical writing to explore and listen to my own and other people’s experiences of everyday life.
I have a particular interest in listening into lived experiences of multi-cultural working-class identity, the working conditions in the creative and cultural industries (CCI’s), precarity, chronic stress fractures, and socio-economic inequality. I’ve been involved with the design, development and delivery of a range of social and economic justice campaigns alongside working as an artist-educator.
I’m deeply interested in how money, work, our bodies, sexuality, gender, health and access to education shapes access to secure and equitable employment, and everything that is enabled (or not) through secure and fairly paid work.
My practice based PhD (2015 - 2023) examined how intersectional working-class experience is excluded from socially engaged art (and the creative industries at large) and studied how queer convivial listening practices might help to better understand and challenge such inequities and exclusions.
I publish writing regularly and exhibit widely. I work collaboratively with the Women’s Research Wananga and have a studio at In A Land Gallery in Hebden Bridge.
I’m actively engaged in research and artistic practice and try to share what I’m working on at least one arts-based conference / gathering a year. I’ve shared my work at a range of universities and events including Cambridge University (2015), Dublin School of Creative Arts (2017), University of Bedfordshire (2018), University of Siena (2019) Freie Universität Berlin / Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2020), CTM Festival (2021) and most recently at the 5th ISA Forum of Sociology in Rabat, Morocco (2025). I’m currently a member of the Centre for Research in Sound Art Practice at University of the Arts London and the Community Design Research Lab at The University of Cambridge. Last year, I was awarded a British Council Venice Biennale Fellowship (2024), and lived and worked in Venice for a month and set up my online writing platform Body Matters.
Current projects include the Public Map Platform exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Architecture and the Design Museum (2025), upcoming contributions to the Berlin Listening Biennale in September (2025) and working with The Women’s Research Wananga to curate a group exhibited entitled “consumed’ due to be exhibited at The Arthouse Jersey in October (2025).
Day-to-day, I teach on the wonderful BA Interaction Design Arts course at LCC, University of the Arts London, raising my new spiky side-hustle baby Little Scorpion Press, dance as much as possible, and live and work between London and Hebden Bridge. I’ve got a studio-cave at In a Land Studios, where I’m often found listening to music, eating, reading, making stuff, staring into space, moving random objects around, raging, chatting shit, writing and scheming what comes next.