How do you balance creative activities, as a curator and artist?
I organise and timetable my days so that I can become fully absorbed within each task. I use Calendars, Trello and Slack and keep in regular contact with fellow co-directors of the collectives I run. The projects that I am involved with curating are very much tied in with my work as an artist. This means that my artistic and curatorial projects feed into one another, and that my brain isn’t stretched too far when I bounce from one project to another.

Please tell us about your wonderful @lumen_london project? How do you choose your artists and curators?
Lumen is an art collective, focused on themes of astronomy and light – led by myself, Louise Beer and Rebecca Huxley. Through art, exhibitions and seminars we aim to raise a dialogue about how humanity understands existence. We are particularly interested in a multi-dimensional perspective on how humanity understands or understood the sky. Lumen first launched at The Crypt Gallery in Saint Pancras on the Winter Solstice in December 2014. Since then, Lumen has curated exhibitions about a wide range of subjects including the detrimental effects of light pollution, black holes, the cosmic sublime and the new Moon. Lumen has a gallery within The Crypt of St John on Bethnal Green which we have kept since 2015. We have organised a number of residencies for artists to view the night sky, in Atina, Italy, the Lake District, UK and Cornwall, UK. We have been commissioned to create light installations for Green Man Festival, the Museum of Freemasonry, the British Science Association and Vivid Projects Birmingham amongst others. In 2020, Lumen received Emergency Coronavirus funding from Arts Council England and we have been able to commission artists worldwide, and lead a series of online events. We produced “Our Night Skies”, a commission for artists from all over the globe to create a time-lapse of the night sky. Artists filmed a time lapse of the night sky safely from their back yard, garden or isolated park. Looking up at the sky is a shared experience and is an act that connects us to our distant ancestors as they would have seen a similar view. Due to the constellations differing depending on our position in the Northern and Southern hemisphere, we see the night sky from different angles. We worked with Anna Dakin and the Earth Society, based in Alice Springs Australia to produce a hybrid-online / offline exhibition “On Ancient Earth’. This exhibition was accompanied by artists talks from artists speaking from all over the world. We produced a reading group with Becky Lyon (Elastic Fiction) called “Reading For Uncertain Times”, looking at books such as “Dark Emu” by Bruce Pascoe, “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer and “Bodies of Water” by Astrida Neimanis. More recently, we led a seminar with curator Jaya Ramchandani looking at her curatorial projects “The Story Of Foundation” and “We Learn We Grow”. Jaya has produced a number of amazing projects around themes of light, space and science, within India and beyond. In the coming months, Gem Toes Crichton will be leading “Return of The Light”, a monthly group discussion which aims to reflect upon and share the ways with which their lives and creative practice have been affected as a consequence of the global pandemic. Due to the months in which the meetings will take place, we will focus on the approaching Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice within the Northern Hemisphere. During these months, light will return, bringing with it – spring and summer days. We have also been commissioned by An Lanntair in Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis to produce an exhibition for the Dark Skies Festival. As part of the exhibition, we led online live events and workshops on lumen printing and solargraphy. We primarily use open calls and expressions of interest to find artists and curators for exhibitions as this enables us to continually expand our networks and find new artists. However, as we have been running since 2014, we have also developed long standing relationships with artists and curators that we enjoy working with. Each artist and curator brings something special to the collective!

How do you see London galleries art scene in last period (pre virus) and how would you imagine it in the future?
Honestly, the situation for independent London Galleries was precarious before the pandemic. Due to the rise in rents, many galleries we knew and loved had to shut down. The Lumen Gallery is situated within the crypt of a church in Bethnal Green, so we do not have the looming threat of “development” but it is still difficult to keep going. Thankfully funding from Arts Council England has allowed us to keep going.