Blog

I've never been any good at knitting, and I have the half finished blankets to prove it! I'm in awe of people who can let the clickety clack of their knitting needles go nineteen to the dozen whilst they're watching TV or having a conversation; all without paying the slightest bit of attention to whether they're doing a knit-one or a pearl-one.

If you've ever stood on a windy clifftop and come across a battered old chain link fence sporting a rusty old sign that says 'Danger' with an icon of a person tumbling down some rocks, then generally, the message registers.  Go no further, something not-so-good might happen if you venture past this point.  As humans, staying in the 'safe zone' is an innate part of who we are; it's part of our evolutionary story.

When is a tree, not just a tree? Well, I've been thinking.... It seems like a fairly bizarre question to be asking myself, but it's one that's come up in the last few weeks as I've been working on more paintings for my Latent Series, which might be my biggest collection yet.

What if the sky was in the middle? It sounds pretty nonsensical....the real world wouldn't work literally, if the sky was sandwiched between two lumps of earth. But working with abstraction, anything is possible right? Hear me out.... The idea of taking a subject, dismantling it, fragmenting it and then reconstructing it in an entirely different way, isn't new.

Am I a squirrel? Though I might not look like one, I think I'm starting to behave like one! I'm bouncing around the studio between paintings, somewhat like a squirrel leaping acrobatically among the trees. Have you ever seen a squirrel looking as if it's not sure what to do next? I don't think I have.

Where do all the words go when I'm painting? I think a lot. And more often than not those thoughts wander around in my brain as words. When I'm in the studio, thinking about what comes next in my process, or the merits of one colour over another, or my next texture for the gel plate, these ideas are always formulated in my mind with words.