As an art explorer and experimenter, I find that creativity and curiosity are key to everything I do. For me, art is all about play, regular practice, constant learning and growing. And continuing to learn and grow is my driving force that makes me super excited! Exploring expression and how to work with your materials to tell your story is core to my current work.

As a self-taught, mixed-media artist, I have a mix of both an intuitive and pragmatic approach to my art. I am an artist and a scientist, and both of these parts of me like to jump in and follow my heart but they also like to work out why something works, or doesn’t work, and what makes good art for me. Because listening to yourself and discovering who you are and what your art process is, is all part of being an artist too.

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What does Art is Magic mean to you?

Art is an opportunity to start a dialogue with yourself, to explore, process and create. And for me, currently, it is about listening and learning. Listening to who you are, learning about how you want to express that and how you want to connect to the world you experience. The magic for me comes from when you can free yourself from expectations and release your blocks and produce the art that really connects with you.

Why do you create art?

I live to create. I have always created, with my hands, with my mind, with all of me. It is so much part of who I am that I can’t not do it in some form or other, even if it is just daydreaming. So I kind of fell into creating art, not realising that from all of my life experiences the one thing that always rang true was that I would find a way to create something in every job I have ever had. Once I started to see that pattern, creating art seemed like the best outlet for me because there is always something to learn, and curiosity is also one of my key values that is set into my very bones. I have to create and I have to be curious otherwise I disappear.

Tell us about your journey to become an artist?

I came to art through card making. As I said, I have always been creative and curious. And that combination, plus not thinking of myself as an artist and living in a world that seemed to revere the starving artist myth, drew me to pursuing a career as a scientist. You can be both creative and curious as a scientist but it wasn’t quite the right fit for me, and after some bumpy moves into different worlds I found myself making physical papercraft art projects for magazines, retail and manufacturers. Then the mixed media trend blew up in the papercraft world and I found my home!

What is currently inspiring you?

Drawing and colour. Drawing is an amazing practice that I feel really connects with the part of me that wants to express and tell stories. Each time I draw, I learn something new and the more I draw the more I see the subjects and the more curious I get about them. It is pushing all of my buttons at the moment. I also seem to be in a place of colour at the moment. And it can express itself as complex layers of lots of colour or come out as quiet, subtle colour schemes. I tend to show the more colourful pieces online as they are the ones that get the biggest reactions.

What does your creative Practice look like?

It depends where my head is at and the purpose of the session. But a lot of the time it begins with just getting started, which for me could be to scribble some marks onto the page, or to start on a page with colour already on it. I have lots of what I call ‘starter pages’ where I have just got scribbles, marks or colour leftover from other projects. I tend to have a trail of incomplete pages that I produce throughout the whole art session. I also often like to work on multiple pieces at once so not all of them will be finished in one session and I might start on one of those in the next session. At the moment the work is mostly driven by exploring colours, marks and textures. If there are themes and intent involved, they often come later during the process unless I am putting a class together. My drawing processes often start with a subject to draw, so that practice tends to be the other way around for me at the moment.

How do you keep your creative practice fresh and inspired?

I am so lucky to live in a big city, there is aways art happening somewhere. Visiting art in some format is my relaxing and it could be street art, installations, the smaller galleries, I tend to prefer the smaller galleries to the mainstream ones. I also love to walk through different areas of the city and explore the world as well as getting out into nature in the countryside or enjoying my local park and again I am so lucky as my local park has a wooded area in it. These things all replenish my soul and so my art practice too. The only other thing I need would be easy access to the sea and I would be completely set!