ARTIST / MAKER
Exploring identity, self-worth, hope, uncertainty and reconnection through silver, painting, image, words and symbolism.
My creative practice
I am a multidisciplinary artist and maker working across silver jewellery, talismans, painting, imagery and words.
My work explores the human experience of finding our way back to ourselves, particularly through periods of change, uncertainty, loss and transition.
My practice is informed by my work as a qualified psychotherapist, but it is not therapy. It is another way of exploring the things that interest me most about being human: identity, self-worth, hope, meaning and connection.
I am interested in what happens when we create enough space to listen to ourselves, to our bodies, to nature and to the quieter parts of our experience.
Silver Talismans
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Paintings
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Image & words
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Symbolism & Meaning
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Silver Talismans ✳︎ Paintings ✳︎ Image & words ✳︎ Symbolism & Meaning ✳︎
The work asks:
What do we need to remember?
What are we ready to let go of?
What might we discover if we stop trying to control the answer?
Symbolism & meaning
A thread running through my work is the human need to make meaning.
We have always used objects, images, stories, symbols and rituals to help us understand experiences that are difficult to put into words. I draw on this collective visual language while allowing it to become personal.
I'm interested in the things that connect us across generations: nature, transformation, survival, love, loss, hope, renewal and belonging.
The work asks what happens when we pause long enough to notice what these symbols mean to us.
Softness as Strength
Much of contemporary life asks us to strive, achieve, optimise and keep moving. I'm interested in the qualities that can become overlooked in that culture: rest, acceptance, nurture, intuition, receptivity, connection and softness.
My work explores whether these qualities might offer another kind of strength. There is a recurring tension between doing and being, control and surrender, holding on and letting go.
For me, creativity offers a place where those opposites don't have to be resolved. They can simply coexist.
Silver & Talismans
Symbol · Intention · Personal Meaning
I don't prescribe what a symbol should mean. I'm interested in the space between collective meaning and personal meaning, what a familiar symbol awakens in each of us.
I make silver jewellery and talismanic objects that explore symbol, intention and personal meaning. The talisman is important to me because it can be held or worn, a small physical reminder of something we want to remember: courage, hope, trust, protection, acceptance, love or the strength to begin again.
I draw on symbols from nature and the wider human imagination.
An ammonite can speak of survival and ancient wisdom. A sunrise can become a reminder that we can rise again, while the shadows behind us represent what we are leaving behind.
A leaf or tree can remind us that letting go is part of growth, that we can become stronger and more vibrant through releasing what no longer serves us.
Painting
My paintings are intuitive, expressive and deliberately eclectic.
Some begin with an image, symbol or phrase. Others emerge through the physical process of painting. Colour, movement, mark-making and the experience of becoming absorbed in the moment.
I am drawn to ancient and archetypal imagery: wings, seeds, animals, trees, goddesses and nature. Nature provides a recurring connection between the personal and the universal. Seeds suggest possibility and gratitude. Trees speak of rootedness and growth. Wings suggest freedom and transformation.
I'm less interested in creating a fixed interpretation than in making space for the viewer to find their own.
Image & Words
My earlier career was rooted in creative communications, but my artistic practice has brought me back to a much more personal relationship with language. I am interested in what happens when carefully chosen words meet an image. When the two reinforce something that neither could quite communicate alone.
Sometimes the words are an affirmation. Sometimes they are a question. Sometimes they simply name something that has been difficult to articulate.
The work explores the space between what we know consciously and what we feel somewhere deeper.
Popular
Making as a way of Knowing
My creative process is intuitive. I don't always know what a piece is going to become before I begin. Sometimes the meaning arrives first. Sometimes it emerges through making.
Working with my hands, moving materials, painting, shaping silver or writing words allows something different from rational thought to emerge.
This is part of what I mean by flow — the experience of becoming absorbed enough in the process that certainty becomes less important and something new can emerge. The work is therefore not simply an illustration of an idea.
The making is part of the enquiry.