WHO ARE WE?
MY STORY
My story starts as a little girl back in Yorkshire being inspired by my dad teaching me how to draw trees and how to sew. It started my love of being creative. Fast forward a few years and I completed an Art degree specialising in sculpture and a teaching qualification.
A hard but rewarding 25 years teaching in schools ensued. During this career, I wanted to share how rewarding the Arts could be for not only children but for teachers too. For many years, I led workshops for teachers in felt making, sculpture, painting, drawing and paper making helping to give them the skill and confidence to teach techniques to the children in their classrooms.
However, in all those years, what I was most proud of was mentoring hundreds of children to achieve a National qualification in the Arts. The Arts Award.
During Covid, I realised I didn’t regularly do anything creative for myself. I didn’t have the time. This needed to change. I just needed a push and meeting my partner did just that. I moved 350 miles to amazing Pembrokeshire, changed careers and began working in my tiny studio. All with his love and support.
So now, this is the creative me. Sculpting and painting.
Look what you started Dad.
MY ARTWORK
Sculpture is my first love. Love at first sight so to speak. Ceramic and metal my chosen mediums. There is something about taking the formless and creating something it was meant to be. And lets face it. Red hot kilns and welding sparks are an added attraction.
Painting is something I have learned to love. Like going on many dates…your not quite sure but you realise…. yep, your compatible and in for the long term.
My painting style has changed a lot. I started with landscapes and flowers. Very realistic and detailed and I really liked the attention to detail but something was missing. It took me awhile to realise what that was.
I think……a lot……. I can be talking about anything and in my brain I have a running sketchbook of images matching the words. This is probably more or less true for most people but what interested me was the things that I was imagining that I had never seen. I was still illustrating them in my minds eye. I have quite a vivid, nerdy imagination and images of the unimaginable pop in my head quite often. That is where my current abstract painting style began.
So my subjects range from space, science and biology, light, fleeting occurrences and time travel, the microscopic to the gigantic, words without form and emotions. The things that are hard to see outside of imagination.
For me, colour evokes a connection. I love all colour but I have come to realise that I imagine and connect a lot to blues and purples so my work often represents this. Hence, the name of my business. Indigo Studio.
I use a range of acrylic paint techniques and manipulate the paint to get the effects I am looking for. Embellishments, metallics and conventional painting detail are used to emphasis the context.
What you will find very hard to find in my work is pattern. There is a comfort in chaos. Chaos is predictably unexpected. What is very unsettling for me is a glitch in pattern and this will just not do.
I’m looking forward to imagining the future.
GIVE THE GIFT OF A PAINTING
Give the gift of a lasting memory with an original painting