Seeing things from a fresh perspective in the studio

One of the best things about going away is coming back and seeing things from a fresh perspective. I’ve had a short break away from the familiar day to day events and on coming back into my new look studio, what struck me most is its clean brightness and how...

Re-organising the studio: much more than just moving stuff around

As I emptied the studio, I’d been thinking of an empty white space, the opposite to what it had been up to a few weeks ago. How would it feel to just sit there and see nothing at all? No clutter, no overwhelming sense of gloom. Would it really re-boot my creativity?...

Will re-organising my studio also reboot my creative thinking?

  I’m really hoping that by reorganizing my studio it will also reboot my creative thinking. Why? Well because I feel as if I’ve been in a cozy rut for too long. Within my studio space I’m cosseted by my favourite work, all created over the past ten or so years....

Exploring dissonance

For the past few months I’ve been thinking about the ways in which dissonance is an underlying factor in my work. I’m particularly drawn to the notion of tension between disparate materials and processes and how their interaction can determine the direction the work...

Dealing with ‘the void’

Recently I read a Facebook post by an artist, an older woman, where she writes of her despair when faced with what she calls ‘the void’, where she feels she ‘has no sense of skill to fall back on, no accumulated sense of accomplishment’.[1] Writers would call it the...

Present – yet unseen

These images no longer exist as works in their own right. They have been absorbed into the latest form I’ve been making in my ongoing chrysalis series; their subtlety now remains hidden beneath stitched folds of silk and metal. Only I know they exist – they are...