From 1986 to 1996 I owned a restaurant in Brighton and sold it when I became hooked on ceramics at an evening class. So that I could study the subject further. I spent five years at college, studying photography and plastics as well as ceramics. When I graduated in 2001, I took out a lease on workshop premises in Hove, and sublet spaces to other artists/craftspeople. Since then I have exhibited and sold my work at art fairs and galleries throughout the British Isles. In 2004 I won an award for Best Newcomer at BCTF, and have written features for their magazine “The Craftsman’. I took a post grad in teaching and learning in HE, and have worked part-time as a tutor at Northbrook College, Brighton University and HMP Ford.
My inspiration comes from flowers and plants that we see all around us, in gardens, fields even cracks in the pavement. I particularly love the secret worlds inside these flowers, in the patterns and textures hidden away that give a continuing sense of promise and renewal.
Until 2005 my work had been mainly in the domestic & functional arena, but then I decided to work on larger, often one off, sculptural pieces. So far, I have concentrated on the forms of seed pods and fruiting bodies which ties in with my earlier work, but which looks completely different.
I like to play with scale and will often imagine the size that a plant must appear to an insect…what is it about the flower that attracts or repels? Often I will scale my sculpture up so that we can have an ‘insects eye view’ of it.
I work in stoneware, throwing the basic shape of the sculpture, then I alter and model onto it. This gives me a certain speed and control which is the way I prefer to work. My pieces are high fired so that they can go into an interior or exterior environment.
My glazes are chosen to compliment the form and are often slightly chrystalline or irradescent, this makes the pieces glow.
I’m a retired of teacher of children with additional support needs and mental health conditions in a psychiatric hospital and other settings. Classroom and therapeutic practice involved engaging and forming trusting relationships with children through art and play. The mutual enjoyment and fun of these activities have been at the root of my taking up painting in the last few years, beginning in the Covid epidemic of 2020. My painting and drawing is abstract, gestural and colourful, influenced by all that is around me and by past memories of places and mood. I find great joy in colour, in vibrancies, in pattern and juxtapositions and am influenced by artists as diverse as Joan Mitchell, Patrick Heron, Monet and Bonnard as well as the patterns shapes and movements in Indigenous arts. As a zen practitioner I like to work with what comes up in the moment, from the puzzle of first marks.
Memories of distant travels and a response to experience much closer to home are my trigger for working and it is a fascination with colour which is the all encompassing ingredient.
The immediacy and physical nature of the printmaking process is a different experience to the more contemplative and solitary nature of the painting studio, but the two areas have become a significant overlapping combination.
During the process in both painting and printmaking, the work will begin to take its own path, and I’m always fascinated and pleased when on completion, the piece does indeed encapsulate the spirit of the initial response but in a form never envisaged.