A relatively delicate upheaval is pulling my practice in a new direction. It’s a slow transition, made slower by my reluctance to give permission to drop the figurative nature of my work. Giving permission, what I insist is allowed or disallowed, against the urge for complete freedom creates its own tension. I’m not averse to this tension and would suggest that all of my work has some form of emotional conflict embedded within it.

For years I kept a daily visual journal and would do a sketch a day until I knew I had to give it up. However hard it was to stop doing it, it was out of the recognition that the familiar was doing more harm than good and constricting my progress.

The compulsion to push an inky pen across a piece of paper was too strong to resist and a new body of work started to emerge. Using text as a visual medium started with a piece called ‘the Space in Between’, a piece conceived to mark the conflicting space in between a couple, exhibited in the corridor gallery at the Phoenix Arts Centre in Exeter.

I subsequently used two Devon Open Studios events to preview two more textual projects from the same series - ‘Unremarkable Letters’.

More ambitious in scope my latest printmaking project looks to using the repetition of printmaking as a driving force. Using three copper plates I intentionally wanted each print to look the same and yet they don’t. In the print workshop we joke about not appeasing the printmaking gods and it does feel like they had other ideas as a whole new concept arose. I had intended to print 100 of each plate and wanted to include the deterioration of the copper over the months but something other has emerged and not crystallized yet and it is this other that is attractive and has me hooked.