About me

I am a contemporary abstract artist, working in paint, inks and collage.

I consider myself to have two ‘home places’: the first, my home town of Brighton, a vibrant city on the South coast of England, about 50 miles from London. Sandwiched between the sea, and the hills and trees of the Sussex Downs, with two big universities and a reputation for music, dance, diversity, fashion and freedom of expression, I’m really happy to be raising my two young teenage sons in this great place.

My other home place is my family home on Lough Derg, Co. Tipperary, Ireland - a place where everybody knows me, close neighbours and friends on a hill, living in modern and pre-famine cottages surrounded by cows, deer and my mum’s rescue donkeys and goats, listening to the bird song, and looking across the lake to Co. Clare.

I love and am influenced and inspired by both.

Background: Care, study, work, travel and pictures

After studying Art in Warwickshire, I studied English at Bristol, and later got my Masters in Child Studies at King’s College in London. Throughout my studies, I paid for my studies teaching art to children; painting murals and portraits; writing for magazines and journals: and working as a carer and later as a regulator for health and social care settings. For more than 25 years, I have worked in teaching, publishing (health and social care, fiction, education and sport); editing and illustrating professional, non-fiction and fictional titles ever since.

Throughout all these stages I continued to paint and have been making my living solely as a painter now for more than a decade.

My work is anchored in writing and many of my paintings are inspired and informed by the words and reflections of others.

Inspiration - hope and quiet

I love to travel, I love to read and I love to talk to people. So many of my memories, and so much of my feeling for the world comes from working and visiting far and near-flung places, which has really given me a strong sense of what the late Jo Cox described as having ‘more in common than that which divides us’. Travelling widely has increased this sense that we are all bound by the same simple need for home, love, belonging, creativity and that we all have a right to the same opportunities and to HOPE. Emily Dickinson compared hope to a bird: “Hope” is the thing with feathers - / That perches in the soul - /And sings the tune without the words - /And never stops - at all”

I love poetry, from Seamus Heaney to e e cummings to Mary Oliver and more and more. In my paintings I try to express how it is to be submerged within a memory and/or a landscape, and the connection between them - painting what I need to feel and how our experiences and relationships and memories connect us.

“Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.”

Saul Bellow

“Hope is being able to see the light despite all of the darkness.”

Desmond Tutu

“We are all broken; that’s how the light gets in.”

attributed to Ernest Hemingway

To me, art can express and inspire and encourage that stillness, that light, that hope - stillness that is not passive, but patient; light that is human; and hope that is not a whisper, but a defiant and joyful shout full of colour and fury.

Sharing creativity

I am a big believer in the value, power and joy of making art as a way to express and explore our own feelings, beliefs and experiences. I regularly teach workshops and courses for adults and children, in the UK and Europe.

Find out more.

Pictures and politics

I am not ‘a political artist’ but a lot of my work is affected and driven by what is happening in my local and global community, in that I live in the world and respond to it.

"All art is political. Art lives in the world, and we exist in the world, and we cannot create honest work about the world in which we live without reflecting it."

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Painting, like dreams, helps me sort out how I feel about and process what I see and what I can do to play my part.