As a fine art painter and printmaker, I work in a variety of media, including oil paint, collage and gouache.    My abstract, loosely geometric paintings reference an internal world of land/sky/seascapes conjured in daydreams and imagination through years of walking and drawing by the sea. I’m interested in the implicit invitation offered by every vista; its prospects, hazards and serendipities, its potential for reverie, unease or enchantment. I seek visual equivalents for these journeys of the imagination.  Formal influences include synthetic cubism and the St Ives School.  I’m fascinated by the tension between geometric forms and expressive, organic qualities of brush stroke and freehand drawing that potentially disrupt their orderly disposition. I continue to explore the interplay between the flat picture plane and the ambiguous and inviting kind of pictorial space described by Ben Nicholson (Horizon, 1941) as ‘an imaginative world in which one could live’. 

 

In parallel, I have an enduring interest in the distinctive characteristics of skilled hand making in the applied as well as the fine arts.  I have carried out a variety of ethnographic and practice-based research projects, including AHRC-funded doctoral research (2012 - 2015) into the relationship between creative making and mental health.  Other recent projects include diverse community-based arts-for-health initiatives, a post-doctoral research post with the National Alliance for Museums, Health and Wellbeing at University College London, a residency using practice-based research to explore the pedagogic potential of a collection of Japanese paper stencils held by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture at Middlesex University, a residency - Raw Materials: Textiles - with Bow Arts, and post-graduate research supervision at the Royal College of Art, London.

​

​

​