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
Hello, hello, 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.
I’m a inter-disciplinary artist, researcher and educator. 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 inequity. I’ve been involved with the design, development and delivery of a range of social and economic justice campaigns alongside working as an artist-academic.
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 structural inequities and exclusions.
My current praxis is focused on researching the connective tissue between the female, queer uncanny body, haunting as an expression of trauma, and symbolic forms of meaning making as methods of refusal and withdrawal from the values and beliefs of late capitalism.
I’m actively engaged in research and artistic practice and try to get involved with conferences / events as often as I can. I’ve shared praxis 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 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. In 2024 I was awarded a British Council Venice Biennale Fellowship, and lived and worked in Venice for part of the Biennale. I was recently a post doc researcher on the Public Map Project in the Architecture department at the University of Cambridge. I’m one fifth of the Women’s Research Wananga, where I work closely with artists Nina Rodin, Lindsay Rutter, Em McQuire and Rychel Therin Scott. I edit, design and produce bi-annual zines exploring queerness, anarchy and snapping with my baby, Little Scorpion Press.
Day-to-day, I teach on BA Interaction Design Arts course at LCC, University of the Arts London, and maintain a studio practice in Hebden Bridge at In a Land Studios. If you want to talk about any of the above, I’m always up for a brew and a chat :)
Artist Portfolio and CV available upon request. I write occasionally about things that move me on my substack, Body Matters. You can find that here. A list of research outputs can be found here.