Hi, I’m Helen Stratford, I’m an artist-architect and academic. I live and work in between the Cambridgeshire Fens and Sheffield.

I have a social practice that embraces performance, art, architecture, speculative diagramming, writing and civic action. Changing life experiences have led me to recalibrate my practice.  Exploring personal worlds of pain, health and limited energy, my current work seeks to re-encounter, subvert, or ‘crip’, public spaces and practices built around expectations of hyper-productivity and optimisation; re-interpreting them with care and humour.

At this moment in creatively and sustainably embedding my lived experience in my work, I believe in centring ‘crip time’ – how disabled, sick, and Mad bodyminds navigate time/space – as a critical tool for innovative forms of art.

During the residency I am planning to work between drawing and performance-based actions to develop an interactive space that invites audiences to examine the tensions and ecologies between work, wellness and (radical) rest. I am excited to use this time to connect with my peers in exploring how places of friction, failure, unknowing and ridicularity might critique the normative and extractive presumptions that structure daily life, and support modes of self-care and mutual aid. The residency is a direct development of an Arts Council England DYCP grant (2025/26) exploring ‘Ecologies of Crip Time.’

Please take some time to look around my studio, at the work and thoughts. Feel free to ask questions and get in touch through the comments! 

With care

Helen