My work often reflects elements of life that interest me or involve me at the time. This could be as broad as a texture or process within my dyeing & printing practice, or as narrow as a thought about the futility of war. Much of the former work gradually gets built into a collection of fabrics and collage resources that I can use when I am working on ideas.

Most recently, my art work has focused on the effects of dementia on both the memory and identity of the sufferer and their families and carers. Within this work I often use imagery of my father, an inshore fisherman with many ‘fishy’ tales to tell. With the onset of his dementia, his stories became increasingly fractured, often repetitive, and usually without context to help create understanding.

Much of my work in this body tries to represent these elements through the use of metaphors (rust & palimpsest) as well as the results of the processes that I work with such as the fracturing within paper lamination, or the glimpses of under layers through the layer of monoprinted gesso. I have explored the language of ‘forgetting’; the relationship between memory and photographs; and the layering within both memory and identity.

Earlier work used imagery and memories of my father to express ideas about my personal journey with the effects of dementia on the family, whilst later pieces have become more generic and the Afterwards series speaks generally of loss as well as specifically about dementia.

Currently I am working with lace handkerchiefs and the embellisher machine to create a ‘traces’ series.