Artist Statement

My practice is grounded by my profound connection to the natural world. I analyse why a sense of  place is often entangled with emotion as I think about what it means for ‘things’ to exist, in response to the transformation of the environment and my own lived experience.

I examine the impact of humanity’s interventions in East Anglia, focussing on the strange and beautiful landscapes of the fens that were transformed by drainage of the land, and the vast, eroding Norfolk coastline. Landscapes trace the emotional cartography of my life – of happiness, sadness, grief and despair. The seemingly endless vistas, draw me to contemplate the vastness of the universe and my place in time, as I think about control, the patriarchy and parallels between local and global issues of reclaimed land.

I imagine ancient knowledge in the landscape waiting to be unearthed, as I consider entangled energies that shimmer within my peripheral vision and question how traces of ‘a life’ may remain. Ploughed fen fields are host to ghostly remnants of rivers, as silty deposits that can be seen from satellite images. What do the voices from the past say?

I observe the environment through deep listening: sketching, photography and creative writing, to respond to light and energy that is constantly changing around me so that ideas evolve through a process of ‘thinking through making’. I iterate sketches in the studio as visual prompts of the atmosphere of ‘place’, for my larger works on canvas. I paint and draw in multiple media, and ‘feel’ the sensation of ideas emerging, by adding and removing layers of materials to my surfaces. Experimentation is key to this process, and I embrace the creative tension of an unknown outcome – ‘encouraging’ materials to settle into place through their own agency, to channel the inherent nature of the medium, rather than consciously direct it. The activity of ‘painting’ reveals a narrative theme, after a back-and-forth ‘dialogue’. Completed works are often ambiguous in scale and can be perceived on both a macro, and micro, level across the plane of the surface.

I want my viewers to consider what might become possible, if human beings could relinquish the need for power and control over the environment and one another.