“The more I walk in this landscape and the more discoveries I make about it, the more I want the surface texture of my paintings to reflect that awareness.”
Introduction
I'm a landscape artist based in Eskdalemuir, Dumfries and Galloway, originally from Anglesey in North Wales. I studied at Winchester School of Art, graduating with a BA Hons in Fine Art, and I'm a member of Visual Arts Scotland and the Society of Scottish Artists. Since 2023 I've worked with OutPost Arts as Adult Creative Wellbeing Lead, running the Art Journal Project — a social prescribing programme supporting adults across Dumfries and Galloway to engage with creative practice for wellbeing.
Inspiration
The valley has been inhabited for thousands of years and is littered with archaeological remains. From stone circles to sheep folds, Hut circles and hill forts to more recent changes caused by commercial forestry and agriculture. There are shapes and scars of human habitation all over the place and discovering them on foot fascinates me.
Practice
Walking is integral to my painting practice. I carry a small kit — graphite, charcoal, ink, a pocket sketchbook — and explore the moorlands, forestry tracks and river banks of this valley, noticing — lichen on stone walls, a knot of hawthorn, yellow ochre pebbles, newts in puddles. Back in the studio, larger surfaces cover the floor — paper, canvas, mount board — and the same themes are worked more abstractly. Shapes distil down. A block of forestry becomes a band of dark colour. The large paper works reach the most abstract territory; on canvas I'm working to get there too.
I work with water-based media — ink, watercolour and earth pigments — responding to what the medium wants to do rather than imposing on it. This landscape is scarred and layered with deep time — stone circles, hill forts, plantation forestry — and I believe our connection to and care for a place comes from knowing it intimately, from the ground up.
How I got here
I grew up on Ynys Môn, a short walk from Traeth Coch — a vast tidal estuary where you had to know the quicksand and the tide changes or you'd get cut off. I learned to read that landscape through years of exploring. That knowledge is in the body now. Foundational to the visual language I think in.
At Winchester School of Art I kept returning to the same territory — walking as method, place as self-portrait. I mapped footpaths around Winchester, documented pilgrim routes, experimented with film photography and installation, and researched 1970s feminist artists asking the same questions about body, landscape and identity. Then motherhood and family life, and art dropped away entirely.
In 2015, living in Greater Manchester with postnatal depression and no support network, Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way helped me find my way back to making. When we moved to Eskdalemuir in 2017 I started painting landscape again — small work, thumbnail scale, paying attention to what was directly in front of me. That practice has deepened steadily since, through sobriety, and through understanding my own trauma and neurodivergence.
Landscape functions for me as visual metaphor — for the self, for recovery, for things that are otherwise hard to articulate. It is the same understanding that underpins the Art Journal Project: that paying attention to an external landscape — its geology, its scars, its seasonal shifts — is a workable method for understanding what is happening inside.
Exhibitions and Development
Current: Royal Cambrian Academy Open 2026; Spring Fling Open Studios 2026, Eskdalemuir
Recent exhibitions: DECADE, Kirkcudbright Galleries (2025); Kyffin Williams Drawing Prize, Oriel Môn, Anglesey (2024); Royal Cambrian Academy Annual Open, Conwy (2024)
Current: Royal Cambrian Academy Open 2026; Spring Fling Open Studios 2026, Eskdalemuir
Professional development: VACMA-funded mentoring with Samantha Clark (2024–25); Language of the Land with Tamsin Loxley, Land Art Collective (2026)
Visit my Studio
CV:
Born:1975, Bangor (Gwynedd)
Education:
2007 -2010 BA Hons Fine Art (print making), Winchester School of Art
2007 Access to Art & Design, Coleg Menai, Bangor
1991-1993 GCSE/ALevel Art & Design
Solo Exhibitions:
2026 Spring Fling Open Studio, 23-25 May, Mountview, Eskdalemuir
2024 Spring Fling Open Studio, 25-27 May, Mountview, Eskdalemuir
2023 Spring Fling Open Studio, 27-29 May, Mountview, Eskdalemuir
2022 Spring Fling Open Studio, 1- 4 June, Mountview, Eskdalemuir
2020 ‘Above the White Esk’, Outpost Arts, Langholm
2020 ‘Homeward’. Eskdalemuir Community Hub, Eskdalemuir
2020 -2021 Spring Fling Open Studio (Online Event)
Group Exhibitions:
2026 Royal Cambrian Academy Annual Open, 23 April - 30 May, Conwy
2025 DECADE, Upland Anniversary Exhibition, Kirkcudbright Galleries
2024 Kyffin Williams Drawing Prize, 21 March – June, Oriel Môn, Anglesey
2024 Royal Cambrian Academy Annual Open, 6 January - 24February, Conwy
2023 Launch Exhibition, Centre For Practiced Arts (CPA), Dumfries
2023 Society of Scottish Artist 125th Annual Open, 19 November - 14 January, Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr (Paintbox Art School prize winner)
2023 Edinburgh Art Fair, 17-18 Nov, 02 Academy with Animus Art Collective
2022 SPRING FLING 20, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries
2022 The Late Shows, The Biscuit Factory, Newcastle
2010 ‘Hyde Laundry’, BA Fine Art Degree show, Winchester School of Art
2010 ‘Tate Exchange’ - joint project between WSA, Norwich University of the Arts & Bath Spa University, Tate Modern, London
Work Experience:
Jan 2023 to date, Adult Creative Wellbeing Lead, OutPost Arts - Art Journal Project, Dumfries & Galloway
2021 Art Tutor, OutPost Arts - Art Journal Project, Langholm
2020 Landscape Painting Workshop, The Look Out, Langholm
2017-2018 Art Tutor, Common Thread School, Dumfries
2011 - 2014 Art Technician, Lytchett Minster School, Poole
2011 Intern, Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival, Grand Grotesque Parade (directed by The Girls)
Membership:
Axisweb
Visual Arts Scotland
Society of Scottish Artists
Upland
Publications:
Issue 5 – The RROMP - online creative arts magazine
SSA 125th Annual exhibition catalogue
D&G Life Magazine, Featured Artist, May 2024
Collaborations:
Iron & Pine Ltd, Royal Highland Show, 20 -23 June 2024
Practice Development:
Sept 2026 Investigating Place With Psychogeography, Open College of the Arts, Short course
The Language of the Land, Land Art Collective with Tamsin Loxley, 12 month practice development course 2025/26
VACMA 24/25 recipient – mentoring with Samantha Clark
Upland Mentoring 2024 recipient with Bea Last
Upland Digital Bursary 2022 recipient
Upland Mentoring 2022 recipient with Patricia Paolozzi Cain
