Thresholds
This installation, titled "Thresholds," is a constellation of 60 digital screens—each one a window into the nuanced psychology of the individual.
These works revolve around the tension between the self and the external gaze. I invited 60 participants—people from my own community—to sit in stillness, a camera capturing them, fully aware but left alone. A full-length mirror stood to their left; a door lay open to the right.
Some participants sank inward, drawn to their reflection like a gravitational pull, their discomfort or introspection blooming. Others, restless, pivoted toward the open door, their gaze searching beyond, caught between waiting and belonging. Without explanation, I let the cameras observe, and later, I analyzed the shifts in their gaze—the subtle, almost imperceptible transitions from anticipation to questioning.
In this piece, I invite viewers to contemplate the thresholds of presence—how, when we are placed in a frame, a camera, a waiting room of sorts, we oscillate between self-consciousness and a yearning to connect. These screens are not just portraits; they are moments of self-inquiry, suspended between London’s familiar streets and the vast interior spaces we often leave unexplored.
Yeah Trixie
2012, Karl Allen - Film Director
"Yeah Trixie" is an experimental short film set in a run-down flat in Clerkenwell. Around ten participants — a mix of trained actors and non-actors sourced online — were invited in without knowing what, or who, they'd encounter. Waiting inside was Trixie: an artist and cross-dresser who lived his night life as Trixie, a female prostitute. Nothing was scripted or rehearsed. Each interaction was filmed live as it happened, unfiltered and unrepeatable.
The film sits at the root of a practice that has always been concerned with identity — not as something fixed, but as something performed, witnessed, and shaped by the presence of others. Where later work would look at how identity is curated by external forces like the algorithm, "Yeah Trixie" asks the same question through a live human lens: who we become in front of an audience, and who we are when that audience doesn't know they're one.
Crackman and Robyn
2023, Short film. (15 Mins) Director
A short film loosely drawn from memories of addiction, though not as direct autobiography — the material is fictionalised and reshaped, characters standing in for fragments of lived experience rather than reconstructing it directly. Continuing a thread that runs through my film and painting practice alike, "Crackman and Robyn" treats memory as something reworked rather than fixed — using narrative distance to get closer to the emotional truth.
The Hills Between Us
2022 Short film. (8 Mins)
Director
Drag Therapy
2018 Documentary
Director
Never Fight Fair with a Stranger
2024 Short film
Director
Buggered
2025 Documentary(60 Mins)
Director