There is a moment at the beginning of every piece when an idea stops being merely a thought and asks to become something physical. It might begin with a line, a face, a fragment of wood, an old piece of china or a sentence that refuses to leave me alone. That moment of possibility is why I make.
I began life in Lydiate, a place with a history reaching back to the Domesday Book, and I have lived in Ainsdale Village since 2003. Both places have given me an awareness of continuity: landscapes change, people come and go, yet marks and stories remain. Perhaps that is why I am drawn to materials that already carry a past. A discarded object is rarely empty. Victorian pottery, broken china and found fragments arrive with histories of their own. I do not want to erase those histories; I want to give them another setting in which they can be noticed.
I have never felt comfortable describing myself through a single medium. Drawing, painting, pyrography, three-dimensional work, 3D printing and writing may appear to belong to different worlds, but to me they are different ways of asking the same question: what could this become?
Sometimes the answer comes through control. I value the clarity and discipline of Bauhaus—the understanding that colour, shape, material and purpose can work together without unnecessary decoration. At other times I need uncertainty. I admire the way Mark Rothko allowed colour to become an experience rather than simply something seen. Nature teaches me something similar. Its lines and forms are ordered, but never mechanical; repetition and irregularity exist side by side.
That tension between control and instinct runs through much of my work. In What She Knows, the portrait offers a composed surface but withholds its story. The viewer must decide what lies behind her gaze. Palimpsest considers the traces that experience leaves upon us—the parts rewritten, covered or carried forward. In the Aeon series, restrained geometry meets gestures that become progressively more disruptive and free. I did not set out to provide neat answers in these works. I wanted to make room for the viewer’s own memories and interpretations.
Writing is another form of making. A poem, a children’s adventure, a practical handbook and a murder mystery all require different voices, but each begins by shaping something intangible. Words can be worked much like charcoal, wood or ink: added, removed, tested and rearranged until they hold the right weight.
The Arts and Crafts movement feels very much in my blood because it honours the relationship between thought, hand and material. I believe there is value in taking time, learning how something behaves and allowing the process to influence the result. Technology is part of that process too. A 3D printer and a pyrography tool may seem far apart, yet both extend what the hand and imagination can do.
Beauty inspires me, but I do not think of beauty as perfection or decoration. Beauty is attention. It is the act of looking closely enough to notice a natural curve, a weathered surface, a quiet expression or the potential within an overlooked object. Making art is my way of paying that attention—and of inviting someone else to pause and look again.
I make because I am curious. I make because materials and ideas continually surprise me. Most of all, I make because every finished work leaves another door slightly open, and I always want to know what might be waiting beyond it.