My work grows out of returning to Northern Finland in 1997, to a place with no existing dance infrastructure. Instead of waiting for stages and audiences to exist, I built my own way of working: bringing dance directly into people's everyday lives — homes, schools, care homes, psychiatric hospitals, factories, saunas, rivers, fells. I travelled with a red suitcase labelled The Dance Artist's Reception, an invitation rather than a finished piece.

Over three decades this necessity has become a method. I no longer ask primarily what work I will make, but what can emerge when an artist, another artistic practice, a specific place and its people meet without a predetermined outcome. My practice moves between solo research into an ageing, remembering, dancing body; week-long encounters with one invited artist in one chosen place; dance brought directly to people who would not otherwise come to a theatre; and gatherings of artists from different fields working together in the North.

Listening — to place, to the body, to another person — is at the centre of everything I make. I am drawn to what a slow, place-attentive way of working can offer beyond the North too, at a time when land and place are so often treated only as material to be exploited.