Biography
In 1980 with a degree in English and American Literature, I started an informal apprenticeship in gilding and frame-making with the art and architecture collective ADBC, (co-founders; artist/performer Ken Turner, and architects Helen Mallinson and Eric Parry.)
Intent on acquiring more skills, I then took a Diploma in Carving and Gilding at the City and Guilds of London Art School. After several years of exhibiting with the London gallery Crucial, and working to commission making one-off pieces of furniture, I started an M.A. in Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art. My studies there were then cut short, when I took the opportunity to move to Devon with my young family and take over a small workshop making bespoke joinery.
In 2009 with my family grown up, I attended a stone carving course at The Dartmoor Arts Summer School (an arts education project set up under the auspices of the sculptor Peter Randall Page). Reconnected to an earlier calling and inspired by the possibilities and simplicity of working in stone, I now spend what time I have (when not working as a freelance designer) carefully making large pieces of stone, that much smaller.
The works displayed are not specifically pre-conceived, but evolve during the process of being made. Living and working among the hills of Dartmoor, the elegant curves of the shifting horizons are the environment which have shaped some familial traits; stone forms with a belying sense of movement, flight, poise and balance, which in turn imbues them with the essence of a distant organic origin.
