Folio of works

Making Ground, 2026

Making Ground

These paintings are an ongoing conversation with the place where I live.

Made from handmade paints created with pigments gathered from the surrounding land, the work begins with a practice of listening - to soil, stone, mineral, plant, season and the quiet shifts of place.

Through gathering, grinding, mixing and working with earth-derived materials to produce oil paints, I come to know this landscape through touch. The grit of pigment between my fingers, brush meeting canvas, noticing the weight and texture of these materials, their nuanced differences and subtle variations of colour become ways of sensing and attuning - of coming to know, slowly and gently, this place, and in turn becoming known by this land too.

This work is not an attempt to portray the landscape, but to feel its cycles, its subtleties and nuances - to deepen in my relationship with it, to find a felt sense of belonging through attention. In slowing down, softening and listening, I discover the ways a place shapes us, and the ways we might learn to meet it in return.

Traces, 2025

Traces

These works are a gathering of places held through colour.

The paintings are created from handmade watercolour pigments made from earth materials gathered across many landscapes - from local surrounds, rivers and coastlines, to places in the desert and through the offerings of friends from the places they have travelled.

Each pigment holds a trace of where it has come from: the mineral composition of a landscape, the movement of water, the passing of time, the hand that gathered it.

The process of gathering pigment is guided by a practice of attention, gratitude and reciprocity, an understanding that materials ask for relationship, care and respect. In honouring what Robin Wall Kimmerer names the honourable harvest, and of nurturing a reciprocal relationship with the living world, the practice of gathering these pigments invites a way of listening to place and sensing what can be given back in return.

Each colour holds something of where it has come from: mineral, soil, water, weather, season and story. Worked together with tree saps and transformed into watercolour paints, these materials are both medium and memory.

The compositions do not seek to depict particular landscapes, but to evoke the presence and feeling of them and the way they have moved through and shaped who I am and who I am becoming. Hints of cliff faces, river pathways, tree forms and geological structures emerge in these paintings through the meetings of colour, gesture and mark - abstract landscapes shaped by the places that have moved through and become these works.

This series explores the ways landscapes are held, remembered and reimagined through material, attention and relationship.

Streams Meeting Streams, 2021 - 2022

Streams Meeting Streams

This series of works was birthed by longing. When the sound of water trickling over river rocks, the scent of wild air, the textures of cliff faces and the audible force of thousands of leaves rustling together was inaccessible, I searched within.

Sensations within the body became my way of accessing the vast landscapes I yearned to be held within. Restrictions on movement over these last years had me paying closer attention to what it really is to live in this body. Feeling in closely to muscles, organs and skin tingling with life, the presence of my own body warmth, the heart swelling, pressure building and releasing, becoming more present to being in my body came to be somewhat akin to being within these longed for vast landscapes.

Tracking these experiences on the page in colour by building up layers and layers of tone and texture, I came to find myself gazing upon surfaces which also appeared to hint at wild and varied landscapes as if peering at inner mountain scapes, river flows, cliff faces, sunlit rocks, waterfalls, rock pools, tall tree canopies overhead and valleys.

Working these stained-glass like images on the page often began with a feeling or gesture guiding me from the outset, yet seeing them through to completion was a process of discovery, of working with the unknown, of listening, of sensing. One block of colour met the next much like exploring a landscape by foot one pace at a time, using intuition rather than a map to traverse the space.

Slowly, through a meditative creative process, I worked subtle layers of paint over and over until each painting, along with my own being felt to vibrate with a nourished sense of life.

A collection of baskets woven 2011 - 2023

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