As child I’d come home from school to find a giant spider-web in the living room or a resin ice cave glistening in the shed - or a plump polyurethane aeroplane ready for take-off on the grass outside. They were all things made by my parents for the Science Museum or Doctor Who or The Goodies. These transformations seemed completely magical but also perfectly achievable; matter-of-fact alchemy - and they made me want to make things too.
Teaching
Art based teaching is a process of equipping students with tools to make and explore; but more fundamentally it’s a process of drawing out rather than putting in. Art helps us to engage with our world, become more sensitive to it and exercise our imaginations in relation to it - and there are very few other disciplines that offer the same level of freedom.
But you have to take a chance and give yourself the time to make it!
I hope that the exercises, experiments and projects that we will explore will present everyone, at any level of experience, with the opportunity to find what really works and matters to them, and will demonstrate that we all have something to share.
“You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down”.
Ray Bradbury
Biography
In 1986, after an art foundation course at Kingston Polytechnic, I was given the opportunity to go to Canada, where I spent three months taking photographs. This fragile medium gave a walk through the streets the promise of unimagined gifts, and in the darkroom the gradual materialisation of an image in the developing tray felt like alchemy. Throughout the 90s I travelled as much as I could for the freedom to focus photography.
The work I made then was represented by Corbis Photography Library and galleries in London - and was often published and exhibited - winning a medal in an international Royal Photographic Society exhibition and seen in publications including The Times, Independent, Observer, Marie Claire, Design Week and Photographers International Magazine. The work was also shortlisted for the Anglo Israeli Travel Award and Wanderlust Travel Photographer of the Year. A picture from India is also held in the collection of the Wellcome Trust.
After completing a fine art degree at Brighton Polytechnic, I started to work as a freelance sculptor and painter, making scenery for Nick Pemberton and later Dave Crosswell at Polygon Scenery. Varied projects included a Viking theme park in Norway, a whale’s stomach for the film Pinocchio, a giant skull for the premiere of Pirates of the Caribbean, and the heraldic decorations on the Queen’s row barge, The Gloriana, for the Diamond Jubilee.
I had worked with reflective surfaces during my degree and in 2005, while working on a Baroque interior for television I was asked to find a way to antique mirror. The result was a sequence of experiments that lead to a series of designs set in mirror – and in 2008 I set up Saligo Design with a business partner, to market them. For 8 years we produced designs and finishes for an international client base - and in 2016 I sold my stake in the company.
From 2005 until 2016 I taught drawing and painting and life and portrait classes in adult education. Teaching became intrinsic to the way I thought and kept me open to the potential of any ideas, observations or processes that one could learn through. It was a lovely way of sharing the exploration of ideas and I’m very aware of how lucky I was to work with such inspiring and adventurous artists!