I am a Northampton-based artist, but I trained in creative arts and printmaking at Bath Spa University, graduating in 2002. University introduced me to a whole new way of working, new techniques and mediums, and inspired me with a love of printmaking which has stayed with me. These days I am still painting and printmaking in between the realities of a family life and love experimenting with new media and methods to keep my work spontaneous. I have never been one for keeping a sketchbook. I love working straight onto a canvas, paper, lino or copper. I dont want to reproduce something I have produced before. It is the unplanned, the unexpected outcomes in my work that I love the most, the things you cant practice, the happy accidents you can never recreate. My paintings are based on a love of beautiful landscape. They are nowhere in particular, but may be somewhere to someone, half-remembered places with only one foot in reality. Its more about that feeling of nostalgia you get when you watch the sky getting pinker at sunset, or the sharp intake of breath when you reach the top of a hill and the wide world is spread out below you. Its what landscape inspires in us, rather than about the land itself. For the last few years I have concentrated on painting in oils and have recently been experimenting with new techniques involving cold wax, inks, pastels and other mixed media which creates textures and layers much like the layers of the land itself.
This year I have discovered a new obsession in ceramics and have developed a small pottery studio next to my painting studio, creating rustic hand built ceramics that celebrate the landscape they were forged from, playing with local clays and natural glazes and discovering even more endless possibilities in this medium.
