Artist Talk with Iman Datoo

Iman Datoo is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher based in South Devon, UK. Her practice investigates the world-making capacities of plants, soils and people: how we move, behave and make place. Working through video, clay-work, scoring, installation and performance, she crafts situated projects that become worlds in themselves: narrative spaces where people can gather, journey, and make with the land through their bodies. At the centre of Iman’s work is “kinnomics,” a transitional framework that shifts thinking away from an economics of commodification toward making kin with overlooked careworkers and labourers, foregrounding an intimate planetary existence in which the human is never at the centre but constantly embroiled in relation. She understands the imaginary not as a place of escape, but as a liminal zone, where alternative values and ways of being can be improvised and practiced through stories of repair.

Iman is part of the Two Together Residency with Porthmeor Studios and the Freelands Foundation. She serves as Head of Research and Community at Radical Ecology and is a LAHP-funded, practice-led PhD candidate between UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art and the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her debut solo exhibition Kinnomics opened at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre in 2025. Recent exhibitions include Gray’s Wharf Gallery (Cornwall, 2024), Travelling Gallery (Edinburgh Arts Festival, 2025), Southcombe Barn (Dartmoor, 2025, 2024), KARST (Plymouth, 2023), The Eden Project (St Austell, 2022–23) and The Plumb (Toronto, 2023). She has led workshops and performances at institutions such as Newlyn Art Gallery, the Natural History Museum, Counterpoint Arts, Cambridge University, and Tate Britain.

Visiting Artist Lecture presented by the Fine Art (Visual Art) Program, Queen’s University.

Agnes Etherington Art Centre acknowledges residency funding generously provided by the Stonecroft Foundation for the Arts, Queen’s University Biological Station, Queen’s University Brockington Visitorship and Canada Council for the Arts.