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 reader, 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 queer woman from a low-income single mother family. I have always felt as though I’m from unconventional and strange roots. The feeling of being a misfit, on the edges, feeling often out of place amongst more conventional family stories and constellations, runs through and informs my praxis.
In terms of my work, I’ve been practicing as an artist, activist, and educator since 2006. I work in mixed media and amongst other things, use print design, film and photography collage, sound and écriture féminine (Cixous) to explore and listen to personal stories of everyday life. I have a particular interest in listening into lived experiences of multi-ethnic 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 in 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 PhD (2015 - 2023) examined how intersectional working-class experience is excluded from socially engaged art (and the creative industries at large) and studied how convivial listening practices might help to better understand and challenge such inequities and exclusions. I’m interested in how we listen together, and how this might offer a form of giving attention, a form of listening to stories often erased, played down, or muted.
Alongside my praxis, I teach fine art and design at BA and MA level. I’m currently working as a Post Doctoral Researcher on the Public Map Platform project in the faculty of Architecture and Art History at the University of Cambridge.