BIOGRAPHY
I am studio-based in the UK, inhabiting, gradually regenerating, and transforming a listed former chapel with my fellow artist and husband, Alexis Rago. Over many years, The Chapel and its internal architecture (all one room illuminated with light coming to us from tall windows above) and context have profoundly influenced all the work that has been done within it, most of which is still held here. In 2019, I completed (with distinction) an MA in Visual Arts, Fine Art Digital, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. Earlier, I gained a BSc (Hons) in Botany at Manchester University and a postgraduate certificate in education from Leicester University.
I then studied painting in Florence, Italy, living and working there for about a decade while developing a deep interest in art history. I am a fellow of the Linnean Society of London, the world's oldest extant natural history society. One-person public gallery shows include Leicester Museum and Art Gallery New Walk, Cooper Gallery, Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery, and The British Institute of Florence. I have also been included in numerous group shows in the UK and abroad. In my visual art practice, I have asked myself how to portray a feeling of correlation with nature, internally and externally, as the perception and intelligence of being alive. I approach a painting as if it were a form of cultivation, an adaptive system, something living. That the painting's aliveness does not concur with the biological definition of a living thing means that I make a statement in this also of artistic freedom. However, the beautiful logic of the scientific is also embedded in my work. Painting/a painting is a boundless field of possibility in that the painting has the latent potential to be anything, and this poetic possibility fascinates me; it has a feeling of alchemy and the sacred simultaneously, the immanent and transcendental opposites all wrapped up in one. However, I must also keep my feet on the ground, which is essential to achieving anything. In keeping with the etymology of "to cultivate", I think of painting, the painting, as a habitation held open as much for its eventual audience as for me in its production. The impetus for my painting lies in its regenerative and transformative potential, which is inherent to it and extends beyond it once it is entirely in the world. That the digital realm might extend the physical work endlessly is a matter of great excitement to me. However, I remain grounded in the physical work coming first - future horizons as they unfold are always a matter of the continuously evolving past. I try to clarify something of the above (and much more besides) in the interplay of the pictorial elements, visible and invisible, physical and immaterial, over time. I call my system of painting pictopoiesis, a word designed to reintegrate painting and poetry.
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