A birthday treat turned into a useful opportunity to extend my practice and find new sources of inspiration. In May 2025 I set sail on a cruise entitled British Isles and European Delights. An unusual itinerary leaving and returning to Liverpool sailing anticlockwise around Great Britain calling at St Peter Port in Guernsey, Honfleur in France, Ijmuiden for Amsterdam, then …
As part of my ongoing work around the Discovery Expedition of 1924-27 I have been thinking a lot about krill. The Expedition was investigation the sustainability of the South Atlantic whale fishery (spoiler: it wasn’t sustainable) by looking at the whole ecology of the whale food chain/environment. It was groundbreaking research for lots of reasons, but the importance of the …
A question I am often asked about my textile work is “How long did that take to make?”. A common answer (depending on the piece) is “between a fortnight and ten years”. The work I was commissioned to make by the Scottish Maritime Museum (SMM) and their exhibition All Mortal Greatness is But Disease is a good example of that. …
The Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther, Fife, is a delightful labyrinth of a place, located in a range of harbourfront buildings. Spending a long ‘Meet the Artist’ Weekend after the opening of my exhibition Arctic Ventures: forgotten stories of Scottish Whaling the most common comment from visitors arriving at the Whaling Gallery where the exhibition was, was ‘It’s much bigger …
I don’t drink, so I can’t blame this project on a drunk DM, just a moment of madness! Hi, I hope all is as good as can be expected with you at the moment. I have a possibly daft question for you. What would your reaction be to a suggestion that I want to make a big, embroidered cover for …
It feels a little strange writing this. In my work plan for Scoresby’s Arctic (long before the exhibition even had that title) high on my to do list for just before the exhibition was due to open in May 2020 was the task of writing a blog about the one large textile panel that I was making specially for the …
My co-curator Fiona turned to me and said, ‘This isn’t an exhibition about Moby-Dick you know’. I had bought a copy of the book for possible display in the exhibition, one of my 50 odd versions, the one that laid open flat best. ‘But it is for me’, I replied. ‘I found William Scoresby through Moby-Dick.’ This is all about …
I belong to the Artist’s Programme run by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. The group, run by the wonderful education department, encourages artists through a programme of workshops and regular meetings to consider issues around a range of practice related topics. Although I love the built environment of the displays there are not many objects that relate …
The waters around Spitsbergen are where British Arctic Whaling began. I first visited Spitsbergen (one of the islands in the Svalbard Archipelago north of Norway in 2012 and despite a busy summer schedule I managed to visit again in the summer of 2019. I sailed from Dover, up the North Sea with a couple of stops in Norway on the …
August 1st 2019 was Herman Melville’s 200th birthday. I celebrated it at Burton Constable Hall, near Hull which was probably one of the most ‘Moby-Dick’ places in the UK at that time. Not only is there a sperm whale skeleton mentioned in Moby-Dick there, but there was also my exhibition of British influences in Moby-Dick. It was great …