About me
I am inspired and influenced by textiles created by women alongside their domestic duties – as much for need as for warmth. This interest began when I was a student at the Royal College of Art.
I won a scholarship to research and study textiles in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Here I saw Folk Art for the first time; it was everywhere woven through all aspects of life. Gradually I began to transfer my drawings into three dimensions using wire and became totally enthralled by the possibilities of drawing in space using line and colour.
In 2016 I made ‘Room within a Room’, a fifteen-metre square installation of suspended objects. It was a material translation of drawings from Wales and Eastern Europe that I had made over thirty years into welded steel forms which were suspended in layers so that the viewer could see a domestic space, interlaced with clothing and furniture to create a linear shadow scape.
Following this I began experimenting with vitreous enamel surfaces. Initially I intended to combine wire with enamel, but must admit I found enamelling so absorbing that I have made the decision to keep the two practices separate.
Two recent commissions demonstrate my new-found excitement and passion for all things enamel…
In 2023, as part of The National Gallery’s Painting tour I was commissioned by Carmarthenshire Museums to make a contemporary response to Rembrandt’s painting of his wife.
Entitled ‘Saskia van Uylenburgh in Arcadian Dress’, my response is an enlarged portrait of Saskia printed onto flat enamel shapes depicting jugs, glasses, spoons, a palette, a mandolin, etc.
And in 2024, the National Glass Centre in Sunderland curated an exhibition called ‘Peoples Art’ in which they commissioned five artists to respond to a piece of Folk Art. I was asked to work with a welsh quilt so I chose one made in Carmarthenshire.
Please see further information on these projects in the Profile section.