Based in Stalybridge, a former textile mill town east of Manchester, I create dark, imagined northern worlds through painting, digital art, writing, sound, print, code and interactive work.

The work draws on industrial towns, working-class life, folklore, punk culture and the strange histories that gather around places.

At its centre is an interest in places that feel lived in, with their own architecture, communities, myths and contradictions. Most people first encounter them through an image, but the image is often only one way in.

Harrowden is the fictional northern town at the centre of much of my recent work: a place where mills still run beneath CCTV cameras, punks organise gigs in ageing pubs, and stranger things move through the moors and reservoirs.

Sootpunk is the term I use for the wider language around this work: industry, folklore, class, anachronism and punk in worlds where the past never finished dying.

The industrial setting comes from lived experience. I grew up around textile factories, with sewing and knitting machines part of the noise of childhood. As teenage punks, my friends and I explored abandoned mills and made them our own private world. Later I worked in factories across the UK, Europe and North Africa, writing software for manufacturing systems, before moving through museum interactives, screen printing, clothing production, music and digital work.

Nostalgia is not the aim, nor is rebuilding some lost industrial golden age.

What matters is what remains, what changes, and what people build from it.