After an apprenticeship in theatre set and prop making at Boundary Studios my painting skills turned to fine art, exhibiting in London, Paris, Hong Kong and New York, as well as municipal and regional UK galleries. I produced gallery education workshops for special needs groups at the National Portrait Gallery and Arts Council Touring Exhibitions, the Whitechapel Arts Gallery and various schools and colleges for ten years. Research into visual impairments led to becoming a master artworker producing sculptural reliefs for The Living Paintings Trust, as well as designing and fabricating large tactile installations for municipal galleries, such as ‘Breaking the Mould’ for the National Portrait Gallery.
installations called ‘World Tragedy’ have been exhibited in London, New York, Paris, Brighton, Peterborough and Fringe Arts Bath. her piece ‘911’, the portraits of all 343 Firefighters who died at the World trade Centre is now on the Artists Registry for the September 11th Memorial Museum. Her large, minimal painting ‘Tsunami’, of 250,000 counted white lines painted in 24 hours was shortlisted for the Bath Arts Prize 2012.
Since 2004 I started the Flower Portraits. The orchids produced during breast cancer treatment express the parasitic nature of the cancer cells, the dark backgrounds expressed my inner despair. the latest of the shows was at UCH.
‘The Beekeepers’ are filled with vibrant colour because they aspire to attract you just as the real thing display themselves to entice the bees and other insects. The pure pigments I use on the linen backgrounds sometimes reach an intensity brighter than the flowers themselves in which I try to capture the atmosphere surrounding the flowers; vivid lime greens of the white sunlight in mid summer or soft pastels of hazy frost filled mornings. The line tracings, familiar in my people portraits collect the essence of the flowers’ structural forms and indicate the wind, sunlight and shadows.
The blossom series are still evolving, using the combination of technique suggests the fragility of nature in an urban setting, the transience of life and always the need to feed our London Bees to maintain this abundant pleasure.