Art & Design blog: Photography

At what age did you start to take an interest in art?

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in art.

As a child, I spent a lot of time with my Grandmother, who was incredibly creative – she really encouraged me to make and to draw.

Have you got any exciting projects/commissions coming up in the near future?

I’m really excited about an upcoming collaboration with Black & Blue Restaurants to produce large scale works for their Wimpole St branch.  They are very supportive and  really enthusiastic about forging relationships with artists, I’m fortunate to be working with them.

This project has also given me the opportunity to collaborate with an amazing Fine Art Printer, Agnieszka Gadomska-Miles.  She has an artist’s eye and has really enabled me to re-look at the work which is not only essential for this particular project, but will, I hope, inform future work

I also have a couple of exhibitions lined up in the next few months including Start13 at the Bermondsey Project Space in Feb plus the next Plan.Open show, ‘SuperScale’, curated by Artch’s at Arbeit’s new gallery in Hackney Wick. This kicks off early March and promises to be a really interesting show.

Please could you tell us a bit more about your work and the medium you work in?

My practice is multi-disciplinary, primarily focused upon drawing, painting and collage and often mediated via projection and photography.

I’m interested in the possibilities of creating nostalgic and/or psychological narratives that explore the often unreliable and slippery nature of memory.

What three things, be it a book, song, film, have inspired your most recent body of work?

1. I’m slightly obsessed by online or cyber culture, in particular the voyeuristic nature of its spectatorship, this has definitely inspired many of the ideas behind my work.

2. Although not necessarily an inspiration, but the combination of intrigue, fear and joy that I remember feeling as a child when I watched films like The Wizard of Oz or the animation of Ray Harryhausen (often from behind the sofa!) informs much of the work that I make.

3. I also read a lot of Ballard’s short stories when I first started this body of work … artist reading Ballard is a terrible cliche I know, but there you go…

If you weren’t an artist what other career would you have chosen?

I’ve recently been to see Fuerza Bruta at The Roundhouse – my daughter’s and I have decided that we’d like to run away and join them….

I actually already had a career before becoming an artist.  I worked in television, initially in the puppet workshop at Spitting Image during the late 80’s/early 90‘s. I then moved into TV production where I freelanced until I had my third child (and my planned year long maternity leave expanded into 10 years!).

Alongside my work as an artist, I’m an arts volunteer for Kids Company and would definitely like to get more involved with the work that they do, they’re an amazing organization. They use Art Psychotherapy with many of their clients, that would certainly be an appealing alternative career.