My grandmother's roses started my love of almost everything I hold dear to my heart; gardens, family, painting, dreaming, and getting lost amongst the flowers.
Growing up on the edge of the Lancashire moorland my grandmother's garden was an oasis in an otherwise barren landscape.
My latest body of work continues my ongoing investigations into the role of the garden as a place of sanctuary. The term garden refers to an enclosed space set apart from untamed nature, a sacred place sheltered from the outside world.
My paintings are not a portrait of one singular landscape, but rather a combination of many, an intuitive non naturalistic colour palette references a mood and explores the margins between control and nature whilst an undercurrent of environmental issues flows throughout my work.
I incorporate various symbolic elements such as water which alludes to purity, the secret language of flowers, and paths that signify journey's taken or yet to be undertaken.
As an avid horticulturist and ex florist, I have cultivated a garden however small wherever I have lived which I then recreate within my large-scale immersive oil paintings, enticing the viewer into my fantastical world.
In my latest series of watercolour studies on Fabriano paper my aim is to show not only the diverse range of our British wildflowers but also highlight the loss of green spaces.
It is in the shift between what is remembered and imagined that the works take shape, a dichotomy of fragility and preservation.