Formed in the UK in 1997, Wrights & Sites are four artist-researchers (Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith and Cathy Turner) whose work is focused on peoples' relationships to places, cities, landscape and walking. We employ disrupted walking strategies as tools for playful debate, collaboration, intervention and spatial meaning-making.
Our work, like walking, is intended to be porous; for others to read into it and connect from it and for the specificities and temporalities of sites to fracture, erode and distress it. We have sought to pass on our dramaturgical strategies to others: to audiences, readers, visitors and passersby.
The outcomes of our work vary from project to project, but frequently include site-specific performance, Mis-Guided Tours (e.g. Stadtverführungen in Wien, Tanzquartier Wien and Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, 2007), published Mis-Guides (e.g. A Mis-Guide To Anywhere, 2006), 'drifts', mythogeographic mapping, public art (e.g. Everything you need to build a town is here, Situations/Field Art Projects/CABE, Weston-super-Mare, 2010) or installations (e.g. mis-guided, Belluard Bollwerk International Festival, Fribourg, 2008), and public presentations and articles.
Today, walking and exploring the everyday remains at the heart of all we do, and what we make seeks to facilitate walker-artists, walker-makers and everyday pedestrians to become partners in ascribing significance to place.
Whilst we make less work as together these days, our individual practice is informed by our decades-long collaboration.
Stephen Hodge
Stephen is an artist-academic-curator whose work falls within the territories of live art and spatial practices. He generates work across a range of contexts, for example:
• Where to build the walls that protect us, an ACE-funded, Kaleider commission (2013-14), reiterated for Compass Festival, Leeds (2016);
• 4 x 4 Screens, a Live Art Development Agency commissioned DVD (2013);
• The Master Plan, a Book Works/Situations co-publication, launched at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2012);
• SLaaristokaupunki, an ANTI Festival commission, Finland and Second Life (2009);
• Exeter A-Z, Year Of The Artist commissioned digital interventions aboard Exeter’s bus fleet (2000);
• 2^6, 5 days of live art inspired by John Cage’s diary, funded by ACE and hosted by Spacex Gallery, Exeter (1997);
• for piano solo, a National Review of Live Art performance inspired by the work, life and environs of Erik Satie, Glasgow (1994).
He is Emeritus Professor in Live Art + Spatial Practices at the University of Exeter, where he was formerly Head of Drama and the Director of Arts + Culture, responsible for co-writing, delivering and implementing a cross-college, cross-campus Arts + Culture Strategy. He convened the Centre for Contemporary Performance Practices, and has taught on the BA Art History and Visual Culture and MA Creativity programmes. He chose to leave academia in late 2024 in order to focus full time on his practice.
He is a trustee of In Between Time, (2017-present), and has been: a Co-Director of REACT (2013-16); the theatre, dance and live art curator at Exeter Phoenix, (2001-12); a member of the New Theatre Architects, an ACE-initiated think-tank that sought to challenge artists and organisations to think about new models of making and supporting theatre in England (2003-09); and a board member, critical friend or associate to numerous organisations (e.g. Live Art UK, New Work Network, Spacex Gallery, Wide Awake Devon, b-side festival, Theatre Alibi, and Exeter and Devon Arts Centre).
You can visit his personal website here.
Simon Persighetti
Simon Persighetti is an artist, writer and performance maker, living in Cornwall, UK since 2011. Fuelled by inter-disciplinary and collaborative approaches, Simon’s work is often concerned with people’s connectivity to place and to each other. His practice includes performance, installation, conversation, writing and walking towards the generation of participative forms that are specific to sites and audiences in rural and urban contexts.
Simon collaborates with artist Katie Etheridge as Small Acts. Based in Cornwall, Small Acts work with people and places locally, nationally and internationally to create live participatory artworks and performances that bring individuals and communities together in unexpected and joyful ways.
Often playful and always inventive, Small Acts projects create and celebrate face-to-face human connection and are often made with participants in the places where people informally connect with others outside of home or work such as pubs, community gardens, markets and other ‘third’ places.
Small Acts work has been commissioned and programmed by partners including Compass Live Art, Creative Peninsula, National Trust, Art Centre Penryn, University of Exeter, Prague Quadrennial (CZ), Metal, Falmouth Art Gallery, Country Arts (AUS), Lancaster Arts and Live Art Development Agency.
Simon’s teaching and research have focused on contemporary performance, specialising in site-specific arts and devised theatre. Simon was a Senior Lecturer in Devised Theatre at Dartington College of Arts and Falmouth University (1995-2015). His PhD Thesis, Mis-Guided exploration of Cities: an ambulant investigation of participative politics of place, Dartington College of Arts/University of Plymouth, 2007), includes additional details and analysis of the background to many of Wrights & Sites Mis-Guide projects.
Phil Smith
Phil Smith is a performance-maker, walking artist, writer and researcher. He is the author of numerous books and plays. With visual artist and poet Helen Billinghurst, he is one half of Crab & Bee, creating multi-disciplinary arts project (such as Plymouth Labyrinth, 2018-19), co-authoring Crab & Bee’s Matter Of Britain (Peakrill Press, 2025), The Pattern (Triarchy Press, 2020) and She Is The Sea (Triarchy Press, 2019). In 2025, Crab & Bee performed Scoriton Mysteries for SOAK live art and created performances based on Matter Of Britain for a 15-venue book tour from Manchester’s Loiterers Resistance Movement to Teignmouth’s Folk Preservation Society via the grounds of Whitby Abbey.
With Tony Whitehead, Phil is co-author of the gothic novel Bonelines (2020) and, along with photographer John Schott, of Guidebook For An Armchair Pilgrimage (2019). He is also the author of the neo-gothic novellas of The Silversnake Project (2023), and of Living In The Magical Mode in 2022 (all with Triarchy Press). He wrote Albion’s Eco-Eerie: Films And TV Of the Haunted Generations in 2024 for Temporal Boundary Press.
Since 1980 Phil has been company dramaturg for TNT Theatre (Munich) and a co-writer of many of their productions, most recently including adaptations of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the portmanteau collection on migration On The Move.
Publications in press at the end of 2025 are Albion’s Atomic-Weird for Temporal Boundary Press and Diagrammatical Performances (with Helen Billinghurst) for Routledge. Present projects include a fantasy novel and a site-based artwork responding to significant changes in Plymouth’s geographical, economic and cultural identity.
Phil is an Honorary Associate Researcher at University of Plymouth.
Cathy Turner
Cathy Turner is a walking artist, writer and academic, specialising in relationships between performance and place.
She is currently Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter. You can read about her research and practice on the Expanded Dramaturgies site.
Cathy sees all writing as inherently creative and therefore makes no hard distinction between academic research and creative practice, while recognising that different work requires different skills and approaches.
In 2025-26, Cathy holds a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to research gardens as places of performance, delving (sorry) into stories of garden culture across history and between Britain and India.
She is also completing a monograph with Evelyn O’Malley: Open Air Theatre: Concepts and Practices, to be published by Bloomsbury in 2026.
Cathy has worked with Deirdre Heddon to draw attention to the work of women walking artists, following a ‘gendered drift’ for Wrights & Sites’ Lost Tours in 2003. Joint articles include Walking Women: Interviews with artists on the move (2010, Performance Research. 15. 14-22); Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility (2012, Contemporary Theatre Review. 22. 224-236). 10; and Walking Women: Site-relational Movements (2024, in The Cambridge Companion to Site Specific Performance, ed Cathy Turner and Victoria Hunter, 132-147).
Cathy has numerous other publications, mainly concerning place, space and dramaturgy, listed here.
She has applied Mis-Guide concepts to her work with young Indian artists to create A Mis-Guide to Kochi and Mis-Guides for gardens such as Trengwainton, in Madron, Cornwall. She also contributed research and commissioned Small Acts to produce a map of Cornish planting and a site-specific performance, Plant Navigations.
She has commissioned other works (including from Small Acts) through funded research projects, particularly when working with Evelyn O’Malley on our Outdoor Cultures research. See also Taking Tea.