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Hello! I am an artist & teacher living in Suffolk. Sharing experiences, ideas, thoughts and journeys. Living with creativity.

My Latest Posts

  • Winter

    In the garden of my discontent 

    Bloom all the moments never spent

    Dreams abandoned gone to seed

    Tangled into matted weed

    Grounded birds with muted song 

    Winter’s twilight ever long

    Journeys lost form twisted brambles

    Spawning dark and thorny shambles

    Naked branches of regret

    Form silhouettes of blackened nets

    Leaves darkened, mulching undertow

    Envelopes drawing down below

    Internal glimmers soft and slow

    Breathe in the must, begin to grow

    Rising gently whispered song 

    Through winter’s twilight ever long

  • Stillness shifting

    The sea is penny grey, an ocean of soft, glassy, rolling ripples. Gently lapping the shore in a hushed breathing rhythm . I am held, enveloped, moving with the swell. I wonder if I stayed in the water for long enough whether I would be sculpted like ancient driftwood. Offered back up on the stones, a weathered treasure. Time suspended, the constant horizon an un-moving shelf of soft tonal shift. Sea birds skim the surface in linear flight, slicing through the air. Stillness shifting. 

  • Treasure and tides.

    On the shore I walk a line alongside the sea. A tide line where the fringes of the water leave behind treasures of fragments sculpted by the water. Sometimes it’s hard to see to begin with, once found I am connected to it, held in a gentle trajectory. Plucking blue-green scribbled lines from the sand, or smooth rounded driftwood pebbles. Ragged gull feathers protrude from amongst the stones alongside ancient dark weathered shoe soles. Fragile seaweed skin-like plastics, salt eroded, fluttering caught in the shingle. After storms great multiples are washed ashore, hundreds upon hundreds of brittle stars. Lifting up onto spindly legs, walking back to the water. Snaking abundant lines of cuttlefish fish bones, brilliant white against the pebbles. Whelks eggs, mermaids purses and purple jewel like muscle shells pepper the drifts of seaweed. Always shifting, changing with the seasons and the tides.

  • The Mist Reveals

    The mist reveals hundreds of draped spiders webs painting them translucent white. It diffuses the sun, gently scattering light over the pea fields, catching delicate green curls. The scent of the earth rises and joins the air. Single blades of grass seem etched into the hedgerow, defined in dewy shrouds. Birds become silhouettes the edge of every feather drawing a line against the veil.

  • Before and After

    Go at the end of the day. Not at the end of the light, but when everyone else journey’s home. Go and plant your feet in the sand, stand against the breeze with the grey gulls. Breath in the ocean, on your own, in gentle solitude. Step out of time, hold ancient weathered pottery in the palm of your hand. Harvest fragments of wood carved by the sea, fill your pockets with lost feathers. Follow scattered trails of birds footprints, forage in tumbling scribbles of seaweed.

    Go at the start of the day, when everyone else is still sleeping. Fill your eyes with soft dawn light, or the blazing awakenings of the sun. Bathe in bird song, come eye to eye with raptors. Breath in the rising smell of the earth, of blossoming hedgerows. Be silent and distantly present, hold your breath to catch a glimpse of resting deer. Holding their gaze just for a moment. Glimpse sun catcher dewy golden threads of spider’s webs, while a ghost of the moon floats in the sky. Sail through soft shadows split by fresh light. Carry the wind, the mist, spring rain on your skin into the day.

  • Lantern

    There are places that feel comforting, full of memories of feelings and people passed. Moments remembered, imprints in the surface of time. New places that carry the soul of other houses, the energy of people I knew and loved. Echos of warmth in people, kindness, familiar connections, a sense of belonging and knowing. Warm laughter and soft voices in next room. Smells of cooking and coffee aromas, calm stillness, warm light. Glimpses of roof tiles and courtyards, fragments of birdsong. Cottage garden walls. Time to be still, to watch, absorb, be present. To feel welcome, allowed to rest for a while.

  • Forgotten

    I forgot the blackbirds song. I heard it, beautiful and precise, repeating a crystal clear fragment of a melody. Singing it back, I thought it would stay in my head. High up on the telegraph pole, the top of a totem, perched against the dawn. Perfect black, delicate and bold, swooping, carving through the hedgerow. He kept his call. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow I will return. His melody had been replaced with the siren calls of invisible skylarks. Darting sounds in the air. The pheasants klaxon cutting the mist, distant green woodpecker, a single magpies chatter. All the other voices, a scattered chorus through the fields.

  • Held In-between

    In the winter the dark can be clinging, damp and saturated. Light doesn’t cut through it, instead adding to the tonality of a monochrome landscape. Shapes drift into focus and recede into shadow. Glittering moisture permeates the air. Swimming, without buoyancy. The shape of a gliding owl blurs at the edges of its silhouette. Softy glowing statue like forms of deer emerge, then engulfed again in the mist. There is silence. Sharp cracks of a hoof on dry branches are sudden and close. Shadows deceive, sometimes flitting across my path. Anonymous and fleeting. The softly caustic air strips back my eyes and warm tears track along my cheeks. The air feels connected to the earth, bathing me in the landscape. In this time there is just my breathing, just my senses existing, observing. Instinctively I track the sky for light, no seeping dawn or lamplight from the moon. Everything at rest, held in-between.

  • The middle stair

    I don’t belong anywhere, and while that’s problematic for others, I am comfortable with it. As a child I would sit in the middle of the stairs, an exposed hiding place. Nobody stopped there, unless they consciously chose to join me.

    I enjoy the spaces in between. Situations of flux, transience and shift. In the morning I ride out through the dawn, as the darkness lifts and the shadows of the landscape emerge. Night and day seeping into each other, creating intangible forms. The underbellies of owls flash silent white in my headlamps. Tiny glowing moths emerge and float towards me. Black fluttering shapes flit between shadowy fragmented hedgerows, skimming across my path.

    Noises are soft and unfamiliar, or sometimes sharp in the silence of the half light. The land merges into the trees and sky, smudged layers of half tones and soft edges. Stars fade into the glow of muted pink rising from the horizon, splitting the sky between day and night. The smell of damp earth, decaying leaves and wood permeates the cool mist. A pocket of time in between, the landscape taking its first waking breaths of the day. Here your senses are shifted, you are existing in the moment of change.

    A sense of belonging and not belonging. Of having no purpose or impact, being emerged in time. Feeling the elements wrapped around you, gently meeting the edge of your existence. Being still in a moment of change, grounded in a transient state.

  • Walking the tide line

    Walking the tide line, eyes tracking the scattering of seaweed and driftwood. Tiny treasures present themselves. Churned up by the sea and caught in the sand, slipping from the fronds of surf. Fragments of crab shell, delicate dried whelk egg casings and scribbles of fishing line. Changing with the seasons, peppered with objects lost and discarded. The line changes with the tides and the weather. Sometimes a clear map along the shore, other days fragmented and broken. A peppered trail of whelks eggs, mermaids purses and honeycomb wood. Birds in the autumn migrate across the sea, flying in broken linear formations. They must lose some of their flock along the way along with the feathers shed into the water. Washed up along the shore tattered and stripped by the elements, broken structures clinging to their forms. Storms disrupt the line splaying it across the sand in ragged islands of sea vegetation. Scribbles of tangled grass, roots and fishing line. Ghostly white paper thin skeletal fish sit with polished remains of shells. Winding trails of foot prints emerge and fade, drawing journeys into the sand. The ebb and flow of souls along the fringes of the tide.