My art is inspired by human and animal bodies, by life-death-life cycles, by our entanglement with all life and the realisation that we humans are an extension of earth, not the other way round. Scroll down to see recent artworks and reflections…
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Still Winter
January 2024
I am learning to love this time of year, honouring the stillness in a new way. This piece is reminiscent of a piece I made a few years ago and inspired by the fallow land and the croaky caws of the crows around Barton End where we live.
I started reading Katherine May’s book - Wintering - as I felt the first shiver of winter sometime in November. The colder days and the longer nights drawing me into reflection and cosy nights by the fire. This past year or so has felt like a struggle with survival at times, a dark night of the soul perhaps, a digging deeper for resources I never knew I had. I have taken solace from Katherine’s reminder that the natural world carries on surviving even in the darkest winter. She says “Sometimes it flourishes - lays on fat, garlands itself in leaves, makes abundant honey - and sometimes it pares back to the very basics of existence in order to keep living. It doesn’t do this once, resentfully, assuming that one day it will get things right and everything will smooth out. It winters in cycles, again and again, forever and ever. For plants and animals, winter is part of the job. The same is true for humans.”
Maiden
February 2023
I continue to experiment with materials and colours, February brings the first snow drops, I see maiden innocence, softer boundaries, more playfulness, mushroom magic…
Crone
February 2023
I’m reading ‘Hagitude’ by Sharon Blackie, a welcome companion right now as everything I thought I knew disintegrates, as I step deeper into my menopausal years, and meet the physical, emotional and spiritual challenges of this time of life. I’m fascinated by older faces, by soft edges, by the heat rising in my body, by my fury which feels like it is burning away all the dead parts… hopeful it may reveal the buried treasure within.
Messy and Menopausal
Experimenting with the messyness, finding freedom in colours and the details of imperfect faces.
Mushrooms
I’ve been learning about the medicinal properties of mushrooms recently and have been taking a mushroom complex (including Reishi, Shitake and Maitake among others) which has been evidenced in Japan to offer anti-cancer activity and inhibit cancer cell growth. Drinking these sacred fungi in coconut milk with a little cacao has become one of the highlights of my day and my drawings have been infused with mushroom magic...
Double Winter
Gosh! It’s taken a lot to post these next few images you know, there have been moments over the past 6 months (Feb 2023 at time of writing) when I thought i’d never post again! It has been an immense time. Life has been sending me lessons a plenty. Drawing has been one of few ways i’ve found meaning and expression in a very dark time. I moved house to a new area, I got diagnosed with Breast Cancer and my dad died. Three major things high up on that list of life stressors and then the cherry on the top - MENOPAUSE! - brought on rapidly and prematurely due to some cancer drugs.
I am messy, full of heartache, sorrow and fear. More ebb than flow of energy and creativity, the shadow dance of numbing feelings, following doubt, cynicism, comparison, perfectionism, anxiety, shame, and my inner critic! No wonder the safest place was under the duvet, ‘wintering’ as my inner season strongly reflected the outer - double winter! These faces fly in the face of perfection, they sooth me somehow when I gaze at them, they are new, they are not pretty, or neat and tidy - they are winter messy faces!
How are you?
How much safety and risk are you sensing right now? Are you aware of your personal surveillance system (in other words your autonomic nervous system) and how it is always listening moment by moment to what is happening in your body, in your environments, and in the connections you have with others?
My work this year (2021) has taken me deeper into Polyvagal Theory and the work of Stephen Porges and Deb Dana,
finding new language and applications in my body work, voice work and creative expression so that I may thrive in our current circumstances and find new ways to support my clients.
The following images are from a larger piece which I call ‘The Autonomic Rock’, inspired by Deb Dana’s Autonomic Ladder. Scroll down for the full original Artwork.
“The top is hopeful and resourceful. It is not a place where everything is wonderful or a place without problems. But it is a place where we have the ability to acknowledge distress and explore options, to reach out for support and develop organized responses. We move down into action when we are triggered into a sense of unease—of impending danger. We hope that our action taking here will give us enough space to take a breath and climb back up to the place of safety and connection. It is when we fall all the way down to the bottom that the safety and hope at the top feels unreachable”.
Deb Dana
Top of the Rock
Safe and warm, arms strong but gentle, snuggled close, joined by tears and laughter. Free to share, to stay, to leave.
Moving Down the Rock
Fear is whispering to me and I feel the power of its message. Move, take action, escape. No one can be trusted. No place is safe.
Bottom of the Rock
I’m far away in a dark and forbidding place. I make no sound. I am small and silent and barely breathing. Alone where no one will ever find me.
Falling into Grief
Grief and loss touch us all. It has arrived at my door in many ways these past few years. Swirling on the winds of loosing my job, the death of someone dear, and as illness in my Dad, who’s Alzheimers alters the course of his life and the rest of my family’s.
For many of us, our grief is tied intimately to the destruction we witness daily to weather patterns, to forests, to the disappearance of species, to systemic racism and economic disparity and the silencing of nature based cultures.
Grief invites gravity and depth into our world. These artworks come as I attempt to understand grief not only as an emotion, but also as a core aspect of being human, a profound capacity to metabolise sorrow into something nourishing for myself and my communities.
Falling into Grief
River Bed
Witnessing my Dad’s deterioration has pointed me to more of the work required from me in these times of great uncertainty. This work, at its heart, is about cultivating the skills to feel deeply, to strengthen inner and outer connections which allow us to weather the storms as well as be altered by them. I am imagining the kind of ageing that is capable of meeting the pain and suffering of the world with dignity and resilience, that supports the younger ones among us in more than material ways so that they may know the truth of their entanglement with all life and come to realise the power of the heart.
Who’s Raising Who?
This piece reminds me that we all need a helping hand sometimes, a beacon in the darkness, a place to rest. The nature of this helping hand will be unique for each of us. In my experience I have received guidance and illumination from all kinds of places and this drawing sparks a deep, heartfelt inquiry “Who’s Raising Who?”
“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”
Carl Jung
Embracing shadows, bringing embodiment and awareness to the lost pieces of the soul, to the aspects of psyche and soma that have lost their way, is a theme in my work and my personal drawing.
Rather than being obstacles on the path; shame, guilt, fear, grief and rage can be a gateway into a deeper sense of being and a catalyst for connection, aliveness and transformation. Finding ways to illustrate this and bring these aspects back home, into myself to resume their rightful place in the larger ecology of what we are is an ongoing practice.
I believe my art reveals formerly hidden aspects of my psyche and when they show up in my drawings I have a sense they are not here to harm or take me down, but as allies to metabolise and support my becoming fully human.
I am grateful to all my guides, to embodied movement traditions which have their origins in nature based indigenous communities, to meditative traditions which have their origins in India and the cultural east, along with depth psychology and trauma studies which continue to help me make this journey into myself, into my own soul and into my explorations through art.
Magic Waters
Inspired by Boe Huntress’s work around archetypes. She offers 13 archetypes which present doorways to energies and power within ourselves. The Lover Series has been exploring the healing powers of water and specifically Boe’s archetype called Desyr who in one part of her story sits besides the well, shedding tears, tending to the well, sitting alongside it but being separate from it in some way.
The Wild Edge of Grief
Inspired by my own relationship with grief and this quote from Francis Weller
"Grief ripens us, pulls up from the depths of our souls what is most authentic in our beings. In truth, without some familiarity with sorrow, we do not mature. It is the broken heart, the heart that knows sorrow that is also capable of genuine love”
Selected artwork is available in the shop.
I encourage slow and intentional shopping and welcome pre-purchase questions. I use a small local printing service and I take time over each order, hand-wrapping items with love and care and shipping out to you once or twice a week from my local post office.
If you see an image on the website which you cannot find in the shop, please contact me as many images can be printed to order. You can also contact me directly for originals or to commission your own unique piece of artwork.
Wild Women
1.
Wild feminine nature, denied by the dominant culture, and my own psyche. That wild feminine, more aligned with Eros and Mythos than Logos. Paradoxical and confusing to the mind. Clarity and definition has its place, but the opposite of that is not an easy movement in our culture. Anything that represents the the dark or feminine consciousness can be frightening to the logical mind because it means a movement toward the uncertain and the unknown. It takes courage.
2.
An investigation into shadow. Faced with discomfort in my body, an impatience that I haven’t found inner peace, boredom, fear lurks in my system, sometimes I have the urge to scream. Is this wildness I wonder? Feels dangerous and dark. And the grief? Yes there is much grief when I rest in stillness, grief for all the times I’ve suppressed my creativity, held down my feelings, run away from the edge, believed that I am not safe in this body.
3.
Reaching into the Other World. The world of myth and poetry. Finding new ways to approach the intensity and discomfort of waking up as a white, cis gendered woman in hetero normative - white supremacist culture with compassion. Grief and rage, feeling it all and showing up for the difficult conversations, being courageous to challenge the status quo even when I have no idea what comes next. Investing in the imaginal realms, trusting that something new is emerging, but not yet known.
Deeper Listening Art….
Deeper Listening.
Early 2020 when we all increased the use of words like unprecedented and uncertain to describe life, my commitment to deeper listening sunk deeper in. My own body under emotional, psychological and physical stress, I paused like many of you. Through the exhaustion and distance from the treadmill a glimmer of hope that something new might be emerging, something not yet known but reminiscent of the old ways. This piece of art was the one that sparked a conversation, stimulated interest from others and I realised that perhaps my art could touch the hearts of others too. A dear friend shared how this piece speaks to her, reminding me of how the earth whispers of our ancestors. I began to hear their voices in the hillside, the hedgerows and the trees, in the new shoots emerging from the grassy verge and the shimmering of moss in the forest. I began to wonder how the earth holds their stories, how she will hold our stories in years to come. Stories that awaken in us a deep wisdom that rises from the unfathomable cycle of life death life.
Eyes Open.
I opened my eyes to the injustice for black, brown and indigenous peoples around the world. A new realisation that my whiteness has consequences for all those vulnerable to racism in ways I had never considered because I didn’t have to. I began to notice people, especially black women, who have been deeply listening for years to the injustice in our world and finding pathways to healing and reparation. I began to learn from them, to recognise my unconscious bias, educate myself about our history, speak with my white peers and dedicate time and attention to unlearning conditioning that centres and upholds whiteness, and realise that this work is ongoing, for all of us and imperative for humankind.
All proceeds from this print go to Imkaan, a UK-based, Black feminist organisation dedicated to addressing violence against Black and minoritised women and girls.
Lockdown Looks.
Impatience.
Waking, aching, loosing, loosening, disappointment, sorrow. I’m joined by impatience as together we jump from this skin and away from this moment, but still firmly rooted in the bed. AND then I remember sweet merciful breath, the ins and the outs of it, the life death life of it, fully welcomed, fully let go, a kind of kindness arrives.
Cloudy Days.
Cloudy days, grasping for the laptop, endless scrolling, the boxset death-march concluding each night. Whatever satisfaction I am looking for just out of reach. Distracted, slug-like, blurred confusion. I remember a wish I had to forgive every part of me and bring each one of them home.
Poison Ivy
Sad eyes, frightened eyes, distracted eyes. I wonder what this is all doing to children’s development, to their secure attachments. I miss the smiles, the infinitesimal expressions that connect, that mirror, that remind us of and to love. Behind the mask.