About me
‘You can go home again…..,as long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.’ (Ursula K Le Guinn, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)
My work is primarily concerned with exploring notions of place and belonging and the evolving relationships between humans and our natural environment in both urban and rural open spaces.
Much of the focus of my current work emerged from the enforced isolation of the Covid pandemic. Daily walks that evolved into a personal documentary of my relationship with my immediate environment have become a habitual part of my practice. I am continually rediscovering my immediate urban environment. Though those dark days have gone, the impact of that time still affects us all. This practice has led me to re-evaluate my own relationship with senses of place, belonging, community and home Growing up in the country on the west coast of Scotland, I yearned for the anonymity of the city. There was nowhere to hide, to be anonymous, just a face in a crowd. When I was 17 my family home was razed to the ground by fire. I literally was left with the clothes I was standing in. Home was gone, the relationship with that place shifted in ways I am probably still grappling with. The notion of home suddenly changed.
Finding myself in a new part of a city I’ve consider home for many years has been a new journey of discovery and making. Whilst my work can seem devoid of people, they are always there. People shape and inhabit this landscape. They have built over it, neglected it and now rewilded it. They leave little snags which capture my attention as much as the flora and fauna.
“snag: that which catches our attention, emotionally resonates and holds use, often momentarily and sometimes surreptitiously” (Amanda Thomson, A Scots Dictionary of Nature)
The presence of people, from fishermen (and it is manly men) on the canal, to walkers, joggers and people just wandering like me, is mostly reassuring by day, but at night, I still feel unsafe being there by myself. The safety of the stories dotted around the landscape through little memorials to loved ones changes once the light has gone. The certainty and confidence of the day leaves me too as I hear the sounds of motorbikes along the towpaths. It is a different place at night – one which part of me feels I should feel as free as I do during the day, but another part wants to leave well alone. Maybe I should be braver maybe just go on more organised bat spotting walks.
This changing environment leads me to work with different mediums and formats mainly painting and printing. I oscillate between the figurative and the abstract. Sometimes I just want to represent the light, show the changing snags. Other times it’s more about memory, textures and colours. I take inspiration from artists such as Victoria Crow and Georgia O’Keeffe whose work explores landscapes both epic and smaller scale.
I am a member of: Scottish Society of Artists , Visual Arts Scotland, and SaltSpace Artists Collective.
I am the Chair of the Community Board for the Scottish Pottery Museum, a community based arts project to build a space that will celebrate the history of the pottery industry in Glasgow and across Scotland.
