Curiosity takes her world-wide, but after gaining her Masters in Fine Art at Plymouth University, she set up studio near the coast in South Devon, UK.
However, she considers her primary studio to be on-site and outside - by, on, or in - the water, such as: sea, river, rain, spring... A preliminary part of her practice being to make time to be with water - to observe and interact closely in a kind of elemental communion.
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Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
– Lao Tzu
Research often involves getting under the 'skin' of water in varying ways.​ She swims year-round, and snorkels in the summer to make underwater films. Most days she walks by the river or sea with various life-friendly implements and materials to court fluid, indeterminate encounter. These onsite works are spontaneous and may take the form of ink sketches, digital films, sculpture, poetry, and also performance.
Thus she not only observes, but also explores, and even, entangles herself in water's fluid poetics, its wild philosophies, practices, and aesthetics, and also, its indeterminate irreverent dynamics in the myriad forms and moods that water takes.
She does all this to commune with water, but develop a water mindset. Water's teachings, she has found, resonate with those of Eastern philosophies, which often use water as a metaphor. and thus her research involves reading widely on these topics.
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Back in the inside studio, she reflects on these encounters - and sets about making work - as if she herself were water and using a fluid language of mark-making. Not only this, but she embroils herself deeper by considering the paper, the canvas, the panel, as if it were her very skin. As such her palette is muted, subtle and shadowy, of complex greys, flesh pinks, tans, of bone winter white...
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It all began when drawing by a pond in the 1990s, she realised she was not drawing an image of the pond, but something deeper, more metaphysical - the feeling, the sound, the scent, the light - some light reflecting off it's wind-ripplings, and some light diving down into it, the wind leafing through the reeds and irises, and also, a robin - singing a crystal clear song there at its edge - of liquid...
She became aware that these elements swirling around her were no longer separate, isolated entities, but rather, she found that everything - herself included - to be interconnected in a dynamic dance in the same one moment - all delighting in experiencing each other. And in that moment, as if to celebrate, she spontaneously - and to her own surprise - dipped the drawing into the water!
She describes it as some sort of casual epiphany, or some sort of back yard alchemy having happened. A kind of baptism. This altered everything, and her communion with water began and with it the focus of her practice.
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