Needle Dance

Needle Dance began with my grandmother's sewing kit.

I kept returning to the image of her needles, small, domestic, essential, and asking what it would mean to make them monumental. To take an object so bound up in the quiet labour of women and transform it into something towering, even defiant. That impulse became the spine of this film.

At the heart of Needle Dance is the Japanese legend of the red thread of fate, the invisible, unbreakable string said to connect those who are destined to find one another. I am drawn to the tension it creates with the feminist imperative for self-determination: does destiny liberate us, or does it bind us? Can connection and autonomy coexist?

Filming entirely underwater was essential. Water suspends and distorts time. It returns us to something primal, amniotic, pre-conscious, and in that space the dancers could embody the red thread's push and pull with their whole bodies: weightless and yet bound, free and yet tethered. The underwater environment, realised with the extraordinary support of Under The Water Media, made visible what language struggles to say.

None of this would exist without the collaborators who shaped it alongside me:

Peter Gray brought his singular cinematic intelligence to the direction of this film. His background in high-fashion editorial, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, T Magazine, gave him a precise and deeply refined visual vocabulary, and his willingness to take conceptual risks in service of the work was extraordinary. Working with Peter was a true creative exchange.

Deborah Milner's exquisite costumes are, in every sense, part of the choreography. Her background heading the Alexander McQueen Couture Studio gave her an instinct for the relationship between garment and body that is almost architectural. The rope-based designs she created for Needle Dance carry both fragility and ferocity, exactly the duality the film requires. She understood immediately that these costumes needed to become part of the mythology.

Carlos Basilisco composed and produced the score, and co-created the soundscape that drives the film's emotional rhythm. Raised in a family of artists, with roots in flamenco, classical music, jazz, and electronic composition, Carlos brought a layered, genre-defying sensibility to the music. We developed the score together, weaving my own classical violin training into his electronic and percussive world. The result is something that builds relentlessly, and then strips back to a raw, violin-only conclusion. That ending matters deeply to me. The violin is where I began, before I became a visual artist, and bringing it back here felt like a kind of homecoming.

I am deeply grateful to Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery for their continued partnership and belief in this work, and to art'otel London Hoxton for providing a venue for the London premier in February 2025.

Needle Dance is about fate, feminism, desire, and the question of what we owe to one another versus what we owe to ourselves. It is about needles that mend and needles that pierce. It is about the threads of connection, chosen and unchosen, that make us who we are.