1. Could you give us a quick snapshot of how the Creative Fellowship has unfolded so far?

From the word go, Ina and I were determined to make the most of this opportunity to work together, and push ourselves out of our respective comfort zones with the way we create, communicate and engage others with our work. Out of this came the “Sex & Nature Salon”: an online edutainment and community-building project where researchers are invited to present on a topic, with the help of a guest animal (played by one or more comedians) creating a surrealist world for audiences to play in.

So far it’s been great! We’ve learnt heaps from both events on what keeps an audience engaged, and how we can use comedy to bring the material to life.

2. How has collaborating and working with researchers and academics influenced your creative process and thinking so far?

It’s given me a level of confidence I lacked before that the things I talk about in my stand up and solo shows have meaning beyond what I was aware of. It really felt like the research Ina and other members of the Sexual Knowledge Unit are doing is the perfect thing to have stumbled into at this point of my career: I’m really interested in how cultures talk about what’s “normal” or “not normal” about sexuality, and why - and my shows are rammed with animals popping up to make catty comments, snark at me and the audience, be weird, derail my plans… so being in touch with world-class experts on all of the above has given me not just loads of extra material to incorporate, but a level of reassurance that I’m not mad, lots of people have done amazing things in this area before.

And on a really practical note: we’ve been in partial or full lockdown for the majority of this fellowship so all the work has been online, and I think we’ve gone balls to the wall on how that can be an opportunity rather than a limitation. In our most recent salon we had me hosting the show from Belgium, a guest speaker from both the East and West coasts of the USA, Ina leading a bad taxidermy challenge from Exeter and a guest tortoise dialling in from London. That’s been really cool and opened up a space where geographical boundaries are pretty much irrelevant - while I’m obviously tearing at the bit to being able to produce shows in real-life spaces again, I hope some of the possibilities virtual shows have opened up are here to stay.

3. What are you looking forward to most about seeing how the Creative Fellowship evolves and develops as we head into 2021?

I’m looking forward to consolidating everything we’ve learned from the last two Sex & Nature Salons into our third and final event, after which we’re going to talk about what’s next in its life cycle - watch this space!

Alongside that, I want to be a bit selfish in the next leg and dive into the material on animal sexology for myself, to produce a visual artwork with it. The current format idea for that is a colouring in book called “Stop What You’re Doing And Colour In Queer Animals” where I want to draw on Ina and her colleagues’ work as the basis for an artwork exploring how gender and sex in nature are much less binary and hetero than people think.

There’s a few very preliminary sketches below including a joke about some otters and a tangle of bisexual giraffes:

4. Describe your time so far in just three words.

Ambitious, sociable, fun.