updated artist's statement.

My artistic practice is multi-disciplined, focussing on drawing and printmaking.  My way of making incorporates monoprinting and, sometimes, embroidery in a series of one-off prints. 

My recent work references the empirical collections in museums and the cataloguing involved.  I was at my parent’s house and decided to look for my dried flower collection I had made when at school.  I couldn’t find it, but came across my mother’s dried flower collection, made in the 1970’s and 80’s.  Around the same time I visited the Darwin Centre (2010) at the Natural History Museum and became interested in and read about Herbariums and the art of collecting and collating biological specimens for research.  I have produced a series of prints that refer to my collections, my history and my hope and optimism.  This is still ongoing and I am reading and continuing my investigations. These acts of gathering and collecting are re-examining my personal history, my sense of place and the notion of memoria and memories. Through this work I aim to articulate and give these thoughts a shape, and some order. 

Ellen Gallagher puts it in just the right way……

The work comes out of my desire to create an expansive, fluid realm that is both the concrete historical fragments it is made up of and the new form it describes.
--Ellen Gallagher

Observation produces questions in one’s mind and further research develops.  I have looked at Michael Landy and his series of drawings (Nourishment 2002), where he has collected and catalogued weeds, picked up from urban sites. Within this context I have been reading Richard Mabey’s ‘Weeds’.  I am inspired by nature and am therefore influenced by the environment around me.  In response to my urban surroundings and my mother’s dried flower collection, I have also started to collect and dry flowers.  This has led me to the artist John Newling’s work (Local History 2010) and The Miracle Tree (2010).

The use of the Spirograph in my recent work is, again, referencing my childhood and examining memories and also refers to the mathematics of nature and the underlying connectedness in what seem to be random events.