Current Work

  Reclaimed: Grafted – this small bowl is both the ‘canvas’ and part of the portrait I am now painting on it. The making of the bowl can be found in Portraits - Reclaimed: Grafted.

 I first made the bowl using Yobitsugi which was a laborious slow process, using olive wood and ceramic. I then prepared the wood with a yakisugi surface; and fixed the ceramic using a kintsugi method. I mixed the gold into the glue (rather than painting it on afterwards) so that it runs throughout the mend, which for me speaks of the journey of being reclaimed, not as a surface behavioural thing, but a slow process which happens deeply & holistically.

To me this is not fusion, but a connectedness where differences coexist and echos the journey of being reclaimed through faith into life and a body of believers. In both cases, like with the detailed and slow making process, intentionality is necessary to journey into, as M. Fujimura calls it in Art+Faith, a new newness.   

   Cowal Kimono: Highland Spring is part of a four-part wearable art collection inspired by, and bringing together, the colours of Scotland’s stunning Cowal Peninsular with the Japanese Kimono. The collection visualises ethnicities and cultures sharing and thriving in the same space. Using fabrics & haberdashery from my own stock, the collection weaves together our internal and actual journeying as a globalised society (forced or chosen), with the concepts of belonging and displacement, and the idea of being from more than one place. 

Design and construction planning now in process!

  I started portrait studies whilst in east London, following hours spent photographing people and places which bought the significance of every person continually into focus. Sometime before, whilst showing my MA work (around negotiating a multicultural identity) and after a panel discussion, an audience member observed that after leaving the care system at 18 she also had to work out how her identity fit together, and that this was also the case for those fostered or adopted. 

More recently, and as part of the Reclaimed series, I have researched adoptees stories, some of whom were transracially adopted. The research was profound and repetitive themes which stood out were the need for permanence, the sense of not having a voice or agency and the need to be heard and listened to, attachment disorder, genetic heritage Vs new heritage, of being reclaimed from a wrong or no status, belonging vs isolation, that adoption was Gods idea of rescue, trauma, difference, inclusion. 

I have put this portrait on a door quite simply because adoption opens a new world to the adoptee. And part of that is having a voice (hence the microphone) which needs to be encouraged and heard. In that journey, where there is nurture & opportunity, resilience and strength can be forged (symbolised by the yakisugi prepared painting surface). The sitter for Reclaimed: Chosen, is Joy Carter, adoptee and adoption activist whose story and further research can be seen on www.AdoptionArena.com 

Reclaimed: Grafted - the construction of the bowl can be found in Portraits 

Cowal Kimono: Coastal Summer  - can now be found in Intercultural Landscapes