My art work is based on reflections and responses to the environment that surrounds me.
Living in rural Northamptonshire I have immediate access to forests and fields.
I use a wide range of different media including ceramics, painting, textiles and printmaking.
In all of these areas I test and stretch their technical limits to facilitate my viewpoints which emerge from an encounter with the land, plants and changing seasons.
The struggle between the visual and sensual experience of the land and the inner sensibilities that they evoke is played out in experiments which guide me to the right process. It is often the mistakes and flaws that interests me most which go on to form the substance of my work this allows symbolic references to emerge.
I use natural materials where possible printing and drawing with soil, plant forms, berries, charcoal and lichen.
I explore my relationship with the landscape through alternative impressions, marks, textures and the careful mixing of colours. It is important that my finished work conveys the texture and tone of the season and echo’s the range of seasons I have encountered. I am not interested in reproducing an exact image or making editions of prints, it is the unique quality of the process and the possibility of making subtle changes in each work that excites me. In print I want the work to convey changes in sight lines, the movement of light and weather but making the pieces unique. This approach allows me the freedom to make subtle changes to a considered focus that is rigorously taken apart and reconstructed.
The residency at Loughborough University enabled me to work fluidly from ceramics to print. I produced work using large abstract land shapes in mono print and lino as well as printing onto hand built ceramic sculptural forms.
I research different maps which give an alternative view of the land, for me they are imbued with meaning and metaphor literally mapping our life's journey. A body of work ' Pocket Maps' and 'Mapping Mothers Day' were in direct response to this.
I produced a series of printed and embroidered handkerchiefs based on old maps of Leicester with embroidered keys which make oblique reference to personal symbols that link to the landscapes geography.
The Hedge Project in 2017- 2019 was funded by Arts Council England and the John Downs Oppenheimer Memorial Trust this enabled the production of a large body of work reflecting my changing relationship with the hedge over two years. Carefully watched this deeply symbolic Hedge was regularly walked along, catalogued, filmed, drawn and inspected. This project looked closely at our rural and urban relationships with hedges as borders, edges and lines in all our lives as well as the biodiversity held within these busy ecosystems in towns and fields.
I am currently researching a Second World War cracked concrete path deep in the woods behind my house looking in detail at the unique biodiversity of plant forms that grow on and around the path and between the cracks.
I have also received coaching from Anna Hart, which was funded through AIR this is beneficially informing the direction of this new project.
In October 2020 I was invited to participate in an online symposium ' Lets Talk Dirty' Loughborough University, the politicisation of what is deemed dirty, where I presented a paper on my Path research and the work in progress .