About Me

MY STORY

My work is guided by what is going on in my daily life as well as my tendency to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. Most of my work is produced at the kitchen table, I rarely have time to prepare, so I work spontaneously in the little cracks of time that form throughout the day.

My themes are deeply connected to my femaleness and all that that entails. I listen closely to women’s stories, I collect them, store them in my mind and then use them as inspiration.

I’m fascinated with ancestry, I have a deep love for the stories that are just waiting to be remembered, either through asking people about their memories or connecting with place, any place. There are stories everywhere if we can listen and imagine. Walls, streets, chairs have stories as well as the romanticism of the natural landscape.

Women’s bodies are my favourite story tellers, the inner and outer landscape of the female form is a muse beyond compare. I am privileged to live in a time and place when I can explore such themes as sexuality, abuse, religion, politics without threat to my personal safety as a woman, however I am acutely aware that I represent a minuscule proportion of women alive today and indeed the past. This profoundly informs my work and I feel a personal responsibility to the stories I’ve been told from the past and present, they are I hope, honoured in my work.

My drawings and paintings have thus far been a journey through these stories, many of them painful, unspeakable. I aim through the process of painting and drawing to transmute this pain into power. I am drawn to the shadow, to engage with what is hidden and bring it into the light.

I want to write new stories too, using film, spoken word, performance. The ‘Hero’ narrative that we’ve been fed for 2000 years is fading, it is time to start telling our own stories, finding the treads that bind us to the past and the future on a more equal footing, sisters and brothers together.

I take my inspiration from the world around me, if that happens to come in the form of a famous painter well and good but it can just as easily be from a childs drawing or the light coming through my kitchen window.

I admire greatly cultures that have retained their connection to the land and whose art is part of their daily existence and practice, some people refer to this as craft or primitive, for me however it is inextricably linked to their humanity, it has not been removed and placed on a wall in a distant gallery.

It is very important to me that my art is accessible, my work is generally figurative, representational but can sometimes require more engagement with the ‘story’ behind it.