Painting in my home studio on the Scottish island of Bute during extended lockdowns, I found figures appearing in my paintings. These strangers - sometimes grandmothers, sometimes a child, sometimes angels - appear as if in the middle of a story I cannot know.

I think of them as characters in films that were never produced, and the paintings as stills from those unmade films.

The making process evolved through creating a textured surface to paint on by collaging handwritten words. I blogged about this process here.

Gesture and colour combine in these lyrical abstract pieces. Sometimes inspired by nature and the world around me in Scotland, Berlin, New Zealand, and my own garden

This work responds to ideas about empathy, interaction, and fragmentation of memory, and is motivated by experience with the progression of dementia and the changing nature of dialogue it imposes.

My art and poetry come out of and respond to my emotions. The most intense emotions of the last few years were generated by my father's Lewy Body Dementia, and by my experiences as I watched it take away his sense of place, as we answered increasingly anxious phone calls from him lost in his own living room, and as I sat next to him on visits to the care home we had to move him into.

The poem and the series of paintings that I call 'A Wonder World for Enid' emerged when these multiple, complicated emotions were brought into the studio. Enid was a frail old lady who lived across the corridor in the care home.

Using acrylics on watercolour paper, I create layers of intense colour through arbitrary juxtapositions. Fluorescent pinks and orange heighten affect/effects on their neighbouring hues. Tones and textures of greys on top of the colour layer work as a kind of ‘inverse sculpting’ by excluding and veiling. The bright shapes underneath and among the grey suggest the rich lives of people with dementia that are gradually obliterated, but remain accessible longer than we think. They reflect the moments that brightened my visits when we managed to connect across fading memories and anxiety.

A series of small and sizzling paintings. These Thank You Letter paintings have been made for places I’ve loved, for people in my past who brought love, and sometimes trouble, and for a year that was particularly significant in my life. I’ve discovered that you can write a thank you letter to anyone or anything that matters to you. And, while the process of expressing gratitude is delightful, expressing the less good stuff in terms of thanks has a healing and restorative effect.

I start by writing an actual thank you letter with a pen on heavy watercolour paper. This is recorded as a photo and then covered with layers of paint, with only some words allowed to appear through the paint. The paint is applied in several layers and thicknesses, using my dynamic technique (url), from thick colour applied with the fingers through to fine symbolic details, scratching and printed lines. The final paintings are abstract, dynamic, and intense. They reward deep looking, with paths, forms and landscapes emerging from colours and gestures.

The paintings on paper are mounted on wooden panels 30 x 30 cm, and come ready to hang. I have also created a process by which you can commission your own thank you letter painting, expressing gratitude to someone or something in your life through (hidden) words and paint, in collaboration with me. Just message me if you’d like to know more.

These abstract paintings express the overlapping, fragmented and dynamic experiences we take from place and space. The physical world provides underlying structures for the paintings: lines of wheat straw fallen from a roof as it was being thatched, or the tension of a young man’s arms as he speaks of friends killed in conflict. Within these structures I layer colour and texture, each new gesture responding to what is already in place. Collage allows interruption of form and disruption of structure and colour, like a sudden flash of memory.

These paintings began with hand-pressing paint on to card and paper. The wet paint was blotted with mulberry paper. On the small paintings, a strip of scarlet was painted on to balance (and interrupt) the composition. On the large paintings, the scarlet was collaged card.

Small: 29.5 x 21 cm (approx A4) unframed

Large: 29.5 x 42 cm (A3) unframed

£90 and £180 from the Shop

These works are the culmination of the long process of artmaking described in our conversation here. The hand-pressing on to shiny card was complemented by blotting out some of the paint before it dried completely with mulberry paper to create almost hollow shapes.

The diptychs came about when a wet print was pressed on to a blank piece of card to create a ‘ghost’ print, and the two prints placed alongside each other. I was intrigued by what might be happening the space between them - between memory and the ghost.

SURface responds to finding myself in the damaged but recovering urban landscape of Christchurch, New Zealand between November 2018 and May 2019.

Eight years after the devastating earthquake, I walked the city. Under the open sky, in the strong light, I took short cuts across temporary car parks, cutting corners, reducing distances. I noticed the surfaces, disturbed by the coming and going of car tyres. Entrances leading off the pavement, going nowhere; an empty space for a door mat. Lines that suggest rooms and, sometimes, pipes, twisted and broken near the surface, continuing their empty, wasted journeys underneath. All-day parking on interim surfaces of river stones, rounded and worn smooth over centuries. 

Watch the video here

And then, in March 2019, came the mosque shootings, worlds crashing into each other. Everyone felt the lightning flashes of fear at the depths of human cruelty revealed, and, following immediately, the immense kindness of people, the rolling of grief across days.

A series of intense photographs of the surfaces of Christchurch pavements and temporary car parks on the site of destroyed buildings, made beautiful by rain, sharp-shadowed in evening light, becomes a video, with original music by the Berlin-based film scholar and musician, Eileen Rositzka.

I created a series of monotype prints, pressed by hand. The black and white prints, with their lines, cracks and fractures, make use of natural materials, including dry grasses, flax string, soil, and pebbles taken from the Waimakariri river bed to surface the temporary car parks. They speak of people’s continuing hauntings, in abstract images suggesting loss and resilience, of the disrupted landscape now being rebuilt, and of fragmentation and continuity. 

inspired by walking the edges of sea and land. Edges and no edges. Light on water on sand. Baltic, Atlantic, Pacific, Tasman Sea, North Sea.

This gallery shows paintings made during my time as artist-in-residence and research fellow at Cinepoetics, Centre for Advanced Film Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, from 2015-17.

Such an exciting two years - discovering layers of history in the cityscape, making new friends, challenged by new ideas.

Many other paintings were made in Berlin too, and the experience is braided into all my work since, but the three red paintings particularly echo the impact of that time.

Greece. Early July 2015. Economic crisis. Banks closed. Brinkmanship in Brussels. Anxiety. A full moon rising over the mountains of the Mani.

It was in the Mani a few years ago that I watched the moon move across the sky each night for a month - for the first time in my life, I saw not only how it changed shape but also how its path across the night sky shifted.