“Unearthed Grammar”
I’m a mixed-media artist working across experimental papermaking, daily visual journalling, and intuitive material exploration. My practice investigates how subconscious experiences become tangible, emerging through the physicality of making. I work with plant pulps, recycled fibres, soft pastels, and found materials to explore edges of memory, perception, and place. This has recently extended into site-responsive installations and an emerging video practice exploring dream-like juxtapositions between the real and the surreal.
By embracing play, spontaneity, and the shifting agency of materials, I explore how pattern and chaos are not only revealed but shaped through process, repetition, failure, and chance. My making is rooted in thinking through material. I work with handmade paper and tactile surfaces to create sculptural forms and experimental objects where meaning arises through listening and embodied engagement. Paper behaves with its own quiet agency, soaked, torn, or cast into labyrinths, it becomes a partner in the process of ‘working through’.
There is irony in writing with paper rather than on it; the material holds memory, resistance, and possibility. In a recent installation, Unearthed Grammar, the drying process reshaped the forms, material matter working its alchemy, becoming part of the meaning, echoing the unresolved, the enmeshed, the unknown. Alongside these works, I journal visually, a daily pastel practice where subconscious imagery surfaces in quick, two-word titled pieces that echo recurring themes.
Having lived overseas, my return to the UK after 30 years brings a renewed ‘sense of place’ and community. This deepening connection has led me to offer experiential talks around a sense of place. Local materials, textures and groups carry stories, revealing time and re-formation through a felt tension between intention and surrender. I’m drawn to the shadows they cast.