Artist Statement 

My art practice is about my personal experience of the fragility of life; exploring the nature of domestic warmth and the outside risks that threaten to destroy it. This is explored through memories of family life and storytelling with childhood objects or places that resonate with these things left behind after a child has gone. The playful aspect of toys can be ambiguous; at once reassuring and yet unsettling, they serve to emphasise the owner’s absence. And as often in life, things are not always as they appear to be on the surface and something more sinister can be going on behind the scenes. I aim to capture the feeling and atmosphere of those objects or memories, not only at that moment in time but also for what they represented in the past. Fragments of haunting memories.

I explore my ideas through drawing, painting and intaglio printmaking. Drawing from my imagination has become an increasingly important part of my work. For my paintings I use traditional gesso panels that I make by hand and build up the oil paint in layers to reveal the imagery with a worn, aged character. I also paint with watercolours and ink. 
I am a member of Edinburgh Printmakers where I make collagraphs, drypoints and etchings on copper plate. 


“If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence. “
Quote from ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot.