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 this shitshow we find ourselves living and working within, I will briefly locate myself. I’m a queer, cis woman, grown in a very 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, chasing better housing and better jobs. We didn’t have a lot of money, (and 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 always felt free to let my mind go off on one; to let myself follow the scent, if you will.
As an artist and researcher, I’ve gone around the houses, but my wonderings have always followed a scent, and have always been centered around the practice of coming up with ideas and then materializing them. It all started with a BA in Graphic Design (2006), after graduating, I worked in a mad range of jobs in various places while keeping my creative practice going and lived all over in squats / boats / house shares / tents / old train carriages / vans (I’m still doing that - but in houses now). In my thirties I kept making work but had a real time of immersion in my practice, by undertaking a practice-based PhD in Philosophy (2015 - 2023) and later completing a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice in Art, Design and Communication with distinction (2019- 2021). I never did a Masters because I couldn’t afford to take on further student debt. As it turned out, I came to academia, predictably, through the side door.
I really didn’t mean to do a PhD, but it seemed like a good thing to do when the opportunity flew at me through an open window. I managed to write a research proposal in great haste, after being told about the PhD opportunity, less than 24 hours before final applications were due – I had absolutely no prior plans to do a PhD. I also thought it impossible, because I hadn’t done a masters. By some miracle I got through the interview processes and was awarded an AHRC scholarship to do my PhD with the wonderful 3D3 cohort at the Digital Cultures Research Centre. (Shout out to my supervisor Jon Dovey who really, really helped me develop and grow as a researcher and artist.) I did the PhD over seven years while working four days a week over multiple jobs for a wage: to support myself, and on and off, my brother and my mum. I’m the first in my family to get a PhD, and I had to work extremely hard to get it. Inevitably, it’s about class, families under duress and poverty, race, gender, sexuality and ableism, and how all these factors often make the UK arts a hostile and inaccessible place to work for people not cut from white, able-bodied, neurotypical, cis-gender, male, middle class cloth.
Doing the PhD was extremely hard, but also a real privilege, and one that has enabled me to work in my field, teaching art and design and to secure well-paid work. I’ve worked as an educator in fine art and design at a range of universities including Central Saint Martins, London College of Communication, Falmouth University, Aberystwyth University and most recently the University of Cambridge.
My artistic practice is transdisciplinary, and I work with a range of mediums. Irrespective of media, my work consistently scrutinizes how queerness, sexuality, gender, race, 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.
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 Fellowship (2024), and I got to live and work in Venice for a month and set up my online writing platform Body Matters.
Writing is key to my artistic practice and in 2023, I published In Praise of Disquiet in The Journal of Writing in Creative Practice.In Praise of Disquiet explores intersectional, trains inclusive feminist-memoir writing as an embodied artistic process. I argue that this form of writerly practice provides a method to work through affective individual and cultural experiences of ‘snapping’; of breaking out and down; of refusing to carry on.
Current projects include the Public Map Platform exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (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’m raising my new spiky side-hustle baby Little Scorpion Press, dancing as much as possible, and living and working between London and Hebden Bridge. I’ve got a studio-cave at Ebor Studios, where I’m often found listening to music, eating, reading, making stuff, staring into space, moving random objects around, raging, writing and scheming what comes next.
I currently work as Senior Lecturer on the wonderful BA Interaction Design Arts course at LCC, University of the Arts London. If you’re interested in any of the above, feel free to get in touch : ) I’ve always got time for a brew and conversations that roam around.