What is it like to live through transformation, to remove healthy body parts to prevent cancer, as I did? Or to be a nurse experiencing the landscape of war and loss through the language of love letters? What is it like to share space with a mountain, to summit and then fall, left alone in the wilderness uncertain of rescue? Or to be the mountain herself, who holds and witnesses the lives of those humans crossing her body?

Through visual art and creative writing, I bring together documentary and imaginary worlds to explore the ordinary-extraordinary experiences of humans and the natural world we belong to. I’m interested in health and our relationship to nature. In what moves us and how we make meaning, especially within uncertainty and the unknown. In how engaging art can help us process difficult experiences and teach us about ourselves.

I trained as a figurative oil painter and had moved to London when I tested positive for a breast cancer gene mutation in 2012. In a moment my world exploded, and over the coming years everything changed, from the new scars that marked my body to the work that I bring into the world. 

Now my creative work is an expression of my wanderings. Gentle interrogations of the extraordinary world and lives that we temporarily share. This world we belong to as humans for such a brief period of time. That spark of life. I think of time as a sphere, something we can spin and stretch and step into to reengage an idea or experience from an infinite number of perspectives.

Through long-term projects, I explore personal stories, making work that is grounded in real experience but hopes to provide a poetic perspective on life and living. These projects begin with writing and research, with conversation and long walks, and take shape as a story unfolds. They can take years to evolve, requiring patience and commitment. 

The materials and techniques I use change in response to each project, from hands-on approaches that include alternative photographic techniques, embroidery, printmaking, painting and mixed-media, to digitally based work with archive imagery, creative writing and book design. I develop new skills as I go, responding to whatever the work calls for. Allowing it to lead me.

I often ask myself what are other ways we can move through life, move with it? Can we profoundly experience the world through the eyes, the senses, the memories and imaginings of others, including from non-human perspectives? How does what is happening inside my body relate to, reflect or challenge what is happening outside in the world and wider universe? My creative manifestations are here to awaken thinking about connections between people and stories and living things and inert or dead things. That is the way that empathy grows and grows us—in opening up to others and the world, we find ourselves.

*

Arriving here is an invitation:

To take pleasure in the expression of a thing / a thought / a lived experience. 

To feel inspired to ponder big things, grand things that share their essence with the small and the ordinary, discovering the extraordinary in all of it. 

To dive into challenging and sometimes painful circumstances and experience them through a prism of creativity. 

To see what patience and vulnerability and bravery can produce. 

To think about your own life and how it fits into these worlds, these stories, our great tapestry…to make your own meaning from them.

*

Most of my work develops out in the world, on a bus or through conversation or on long walks in the woods. The rest of the time you can find me at Thames-Side Studios in Woolwich, southeast London.