In 1992 I completed a MA Hons Fine Art degree at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art, a five year degree split equally between the History of Art and studio-based art practice. After a pause working in the arts sector and starting my family, I resumed a daily art practice in 2012.  This has evolved through constant experimentation in visual diaries and sketchbooks, which has enabled me to find my voice and my preferred palette of colours.

My recent work is influenced by remembered landscapes, earthy textured pottery ware, and motifs of seeds, biological cells and dried petals.  These all have a relationship to the land beneath my feet. I am creating a sense of a personal archaeology, weaving in familial connections, enhanced by recurring trips to familiar places layered with memories.

These remembered landscapes include treasured childhood walks with my geographer Dad who taught me so much about the land.  I loved his beautiful ink illustrations of geological cross-sections.  I inherited my Mum’s curated collection of pottery ware, and the still life elements of my work commemorate her, as I explore the pots’ relevance to the landscapes the clay came from.  The new fascination with the shapes of seeds, cells and petals comes from my drawings of these pots and bowls evolving into more abstract shapes.

Daily sketchbook practice remains a big part of my work since 2012, a commitment to a regular rhythm of working in my visual diaries and sketchbooks.  This builds momentum, has revolutionised my approach to mark-making and motivates my desire to explore and experiment.

Since 2021, I have been experimenting with small works on paper. These layered and textured miniatures have continued to evolve through the influence of remembered landscapes, the earthiness and texture of pottery ware, and the living organisms found in healthy soil.

EDUCATION AND CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

2022 – present:   Mentoring with visual artist, writer and mentor Samantha Clark

2022   My sketchbooks were referenced at an international InSEA webinar as an exemplar of using visual journals to develop visual thinking in education.

2014   Selected participant in the Scottish Book Trust Illustration Lab (led by Jonathan Gibbs and Vivian French, with Catherine Rayner and Nick Sharratt)

2013   Member-tutor, AccessArt ‘Focus on Drawing’ project (online)

1993 – 1994   Moray House Institute of Education, AMTIS postgraduate training programme with placement in the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

1987-1992   Edinburgh University & Edinburgh College of Art, MA (Hons) Fine Art 

COLLECTIONS
Work in private collections in UK and America

 EMPLOYMENT

2022 – present   Social Media Marketeer, AccessArt Creative Direction Team (resource contributor 2012 – present)

1997 – 2007   Grants Administrator, Scottish Arts Council

1994 – 2001   Grants Admin Assistant, Edinburgh City Council Arts Development Team.  Arts administration for Edinburgh District Arts Council.

2016

• The AccessArt Village Project for which participants were invited to send in a sewn drawing of their home on a 20cm square piece of fabric. All kinds of stitched mark-making were encouraged, and it was lovely to see such an amazing response to the project. Around 700 sewn squares, from all kinds of audiences all over the world, were submitted. For AccessArt, the project “…celebrated diversity and reminded us of the universal sanctity of ‘home’”. These squared pieces were mounted and toured as a ‘village’ to venues within the UK in 2017 and 2018, with school workshops also held. www.accessart.org.uk/accessartvillage
• The AccessArt August Creative Challenge where the concept was to create something new each day throughout August. My friend and fellow artist Andrea Butler and I shared and discussed our resulting work on a daily basis on the AccessArt website. I used a self-made concertina sketchbook to explore this challenge through illustration and narration, and experimented with a different approach each day. It was quite an intense process but I really enjoyed pushing myself daily to come up with new ideas and explore different mediums, and a bonus was discovering accidental narrative threads throughout my concertina sketchbook.

2018

• Surface Print workshop, Hidden Door Arts Festival, Edinburgh, May 2018. The focus was on monoprinting using textured objects and surfaces, and it enabled me to work more abstractly. I really enjoyed working impulsively on achieving harmony in the composition and layering of colours and textures, which in turn generated interesting new colours, patterns and depth. This again revolutionised my daily practice, and has led to a love of layering, textured surfaces, and depth of colour in my work.
• House of Illustration One Inch Square Drawing a Day Challenge, September 2018. Again, a pretty intense challenge, more so due to the size constraints. I chose to focus on faces, switching from ink in the early days of the challenge to working with colour, and I shared my work on a daily basis on my Instagram page. I also chose to show alongside each completed square the choice of mediums and colours used. An added bonus was discovering the practicality and speed of working small-scale as my studio practice has to fit around the needs of my family.

2019

• I chose to challenge myself to continue with further experimentation with colour, scale, texture and mixed media, which resulted in exploring a significant shift from figure sketches in daily visual diaries to landscapes in my sketchbooks. The aim was not to produce fully resolved landscape sketches but to generate experiments where I could explore my thoughts and feelings about what I was seeing and experiencing. Some were straightforward sketches done in situ, others that were further developed or altered from memory.