My work is primarily print based but other disciplines such as photography, drawing and painting feed into research as I explore the boundaries of the initial project. Often I test out an idea in a range of print media until something 'fits'. Access to the facilities at UCLan allowed me to explore in more depth a project I had already begun on the impact of illness and disease on both the human body and the lives of those affected. Without this access I would have been unable to finish the project to this level.

Early explorations involved abandoning photography in favour of paintings of internal organs and associated diseases. Later images integrated text, photography, and drawings into the final piece. Out of it came the desire to 'put the person back' into the picture. The research project progressed using the properties of non-toxic photo intaglio to experiment with this layering, adding and removing the light sensitive film, exposing it to UV light to create a new deposit of images, each reacting to the layer beneath, and then developing it in the etching bath to remove unexposed film revealing sections of the previous image beneath.

This process came to form a metaphor for the way the body responds to treatment for cancer, and how we deal with the impact on our lives, sometimes feeling overwhelmed.

The image shows a detail of the result of this layering process, comprised of multiple images and layers, the person in the print almost (but not quite) lost from view.