About

Emerging artist, working primarily with portrait and documentary photography, mixed media and soundscapes/spoken word highlighting intimate, introspective stories. Self-taught, I worked in the arts for the past thirty years (Theatre Design at Nottingham Trent University; Lighting & Sound at Nottingham Playhouse; co-founder of Artfeeder, a creative commercial photography company for over ten years).

Currently working in a pastoral role supporting students at NTU and caring for my teenage sons. Recently a carer to my late mother who had myeloma and my late father who had Alzheimer’s.

My art and personal photographic studies have, until now, remained private and intuitive. I’m mostly concerned with the fascinating, detailed intimate stories that arise from social and personal issues.

The extraordinary in the ordinary.

My photographic instinct is primarily an emotional one. Concerned with connection rather than the perfectly crafted, these days I love the immediacy of the moment that the mobile phone lens affords me. My motivations are the exploration and search for truth, the beauty in the unexpected and to illuminate and explore our fragile and flawed humanity. My current projects, Identity: Finding It And Losing It, In A Noisy World, He Spoke Quietly; “Am I Your Father?” : Workings of a Discombobulated Mind; and Sons all explore identity: the hiding/construction of it; the loss of it through ageing and dementia; burgeoning identity in the young, particularly young men who find themselves on the wrong side of accepted societal norms. Future projects will focus on this exclusion and disengagement and the outsider syndrome. Other projects such as Curating The Descent Into Loss And Madness (mixed media) tackle age old themes of bereavement in its many different forms: death, suicide, abandonment, loss of self, menopause, loneliness, ill health, children flying the nest and the relentless obsessions and eventually, reinvention that these bring,

Whilst respecting the boundary between searching and intrusive, I like to get under the skin and beyond personas. The emotional and personal is fundamental to my art, particularly the exploration of the meaning of private vs. public. Self-expression in all its forms fascinates me. As a child, I straddled two worlds, that of my working class Spanish immigrant parents and the beloved English aristocratic family they worked for. During my thirties, I spent seven years living in a small community in rural Galicia, north-west Spain, a far cry from the amusement arcade glamour of the 1970s Isle Of Man of my childhood or the middle class, chocolate-box-pretty, English village of my youth. Living as an outsider in all three countries and an observer of complicated, rapidly changing cultures, further motivated my fascination with identity, perceptions and our unwavering obsession with fitting in.