Dr Alan Raw FRSA FSI

Thirty years. One focus: celebrate what’s here and activate what’s possible. 

I’m a creative sustainability practitioner, photographer, sound artist, art collector, musician, DJ, gallery curator, coder, and published author. Those are the labels. The practice has always been finding communities and creative individuals who aren’t being seen, and creating the conditions for them to be celebrated.

“I’m a neurodiverse thinker. I work in the in-between spaces, where culture meets ecology, where community meets technology, where the story that needs telling doesn’t have an obvious teller yet.”

Where it started:

I was working as a youth and community arts worker in Hull in the early 1990s, teaching filmmaking and music in youth centres, drumming and DJing on the side. One night at Hull Irish Centre, I got talking to a young graffiti artist named Chris McKnight. I suggested he come to the youth club. He did. When the club’s worker in charge left shortly after, I appealed to the young people rather than letting the place close. They said they wanted to make it their own. So with Chris’s help we graffitied the walls together, built a stage, and I started teaching everything I knew about art and music. Soon, we were being invited to run workshops at festivals and other centres.

We formed a team, with Chris on graffiti, my talented friend and housemate Simon Crook on music and comic art, and me on music, illustration, and coordinating the events. We went through various names and in 1993 became the social enterprise that is now called The Creative & Cultural Organisation. Thirty three years later, I’m still coordinating/curating and Chris still leads on graffiti.

My Work at The Creative & Cultural Organisation:    

Since 1993, with C&C, I’ve run over 120 exhibitions across 34 disused spaces. Pop-up galleries in empty shops, recording studios in abandoned buildings, events built entirely from volunteer time and up-cycled resources. We ran Vapour, a graffiti festival from 1995 to 2005, featured in Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents, which brought artists from across the UK and France. It helped launch careers that have since taken people into design studios, and creative businesses across the world. I organised COMSEM 94, a comic seminar sponsored by Marvel, Deadline, and Fleetway. I founded Humber Eco Fest, which engaged over 60,000 people across 116 events in one month, in three local authorities. I have curated for three European Capitals of Culture and exhibitions during Hull City of Culture.

The organisation has never taken external funding. Thirty years, entirely volunteer-run.

Sadly our most recent physical spaces were sold to corporate landlords who immediately evicted us, and have left them empty and commercially dead on the high street ever since. Our practice is in a state of reconstruction. That reconstruction is now the focus of my work.

Photography:

I’m a Lomo-amego and former curator of Lomography Embassy Hull, shooting on 35mm and 120 film, collecting and refurbishing vintage cameras, committed to the imperfect tool and what it sees that the clean digital frame misses. I’ve shot under Fujifilm and Lomography sponsorship, with my street photography shown in the Fujiholics ‘Home’ exhibition, and I’ve curated PhotoCity London in Paternoster Square for Fuji, Camera World, and Genesis.

For a decade, from 2014 to 2023, I directed HIPfest, the UK’s largest annual photography festival at that time, working with the world’s finest, including Brian Griffin, Peter Dench, Tom Stoddart, Rhiannon Adam, John Bulmer, Matthew Finn, Frieke Janssens, and the late great Marilyn Stafford, whose 2018 retrospective I curated in a disused city-centre fashion store, resulted in her being featured on BBC television and receiving a lifetime achievement award.

In 2014, I also co-founded Hull Independent Photography Gallery and Club, which teaches people to see, shoot, and exhibit, from age eight upwards. It is still running.                                  

For over two decades, I documented live music from inside the performances, hundreds of gigs, as an official BBC photographer at Leeds Festival, and made music videos for bands that went on to MTV. My camera and my drum kit also often occupied the same spaces, sometimes simultaneously on my session musician tours.

In 2025, I drove across 11 countries in Europe, touring my solarpunk novel Salt & Seeds and meeting communities. Of course, I took my camera. That journey is becoming a photo book with Grokkist Press.                       

Sound ART, instruments and music:            

I started on the Bodhran at age ten, in my father’s Irish Ceilidh band. My great-grandfather made Irish military drums. The lineage runs deep.

From there: session musician and DJ, endorsed by JHS, Dream Cymbals, Denon, Akia, and Regal Tip. Drum Teacher of the Year 2013. Chair of the World Drumming Network. Featured in Gear Magazine, Music Week, and Rhythm Magazine. Profiled by John Peel on Channel 4. Collaborator with Benjamin Zephaniah on a dub album.

In the early 1990s, I was circuit-bending instruments before Reed Ghazala named the practice. My circuit-bent electronic percussion kit was integrated into an acoustic drum kit and performed live at Glastonbury in 1997 on the Avalon Stage. I was part of the team that brought the Hull Sea Dragon gamelan to the Albemarle Centre after training with Manchester Camerata. I have worked with the Soundbeam system, translating body movement into music for people with limited mobility. I received a Universal Zulu Nation Wisdom Award for my services to Hip Hop.   

My current sound art practice operates under the name Loosetriggers. Live coding in Sonic Pi, generative visuals, and playing the Rawfield Generator, a custom synthesis instrument I built for gallery sound environments. The aesthetic is marine: field recordings from the Humber estuary, drone synthesis, the hirajoshi scale. The hardware is upcycled and battery-powered, charged by solar.

Writing:

My home city is 90% below the high tide line. East Yorkshire is the fastest eroding coastline in Europe. The 2007 Hull floods came through my house. The 2013 Humber storm surge did over £50 million in damage to the local industry.

Salt & Seeds is the novel that grew from all of that, a climate fiction novel set in the near future, when the water doesn’t recede. Published by Grokkist Press in 2025. The second edition will be released in summer 2026. Danu Poyner of Grokkist Press describes it as containing “one of the best metaphors I’ve encountered in recent fiction.”

To Sustainability and Beyond: A Practical Guide to Environmental Responsibility in the Space Sector, also on Grokkist Press, was launched at Space Unites in RSA House, London during Space Comm Europe 2026.

I’m currently also writing and illustrating children’s stories, with RSA Playful Green Planet at the University of Hull Forest School.                 

I facilitate the RSA Northern Writer’s Group, the monthly Grokkist Press Writing Salon, and run climate storytelling workshops for East Riding Libraries, Hull University, and the RSA.                                  

BBC and Media:                          

For 21 years, I was a BBC radio journalist, presenter, producer, photographer and engineer. I co-founded BBC Introducing, starting the unsigned music stage at Leeds Festival in 2002 and presenting it for seventeen years, giving first plays to artists including Yungblud. I created BBC Eco-Time, presented for BBC Children in Need, Radio 1’s Big Weekend, 1Xtra, 6music…and was the first DJ to play a set in the 3,000-capacity Connexin Live Arena, broadcast on the BBC.

Sustainability:

I’m Co-founder and CTO of Humber Natural Capital, developing technology for nature-based solutions using Earth observation, working with local authorities, developers, ecologists, and communities on Biodiversity Net Gain and long-term environmental stewardship.

I’m a Director of the Association of Sustainability Practitioners, RSA Fellowship Councillor for the North of England, Fellow of the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, RSA Playful Green Planet Champion, RSA Space Network Co-Founder, and a Mentor with the CAA-funded Ascend-2-Space mission.

I’ve delivered over 300 speaking and facilitation engagements, from community settings to stadiums, including keynote speaker for Humber Business Week 2026 on Earth Day, plus UK Tech Week, Space Tech Assembly, and RSA Space Unites.

I hold an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Hull for sustainability and creative practice. I’m a European Commission Registered Expert in Sustainability, a PDC-qualified Permaculture Association member, and hold IEMA and UNITAR sustainability certifications.

The work right now: 

The practice is in transition. The physical spaces that held thirty years of art-making in the community are gone. I’m working out what comes next, through code, field recordings, photography, curation, storytelling, climate fiction, and workshop facilitation. The documentation, creative activation, and celebration of good practice continues, as I work towards an MA in Creative Practice.

Here’s three video’s of me being interviewed about different areas of my work: