My art practice runs alongside my clinical practice as an art therapist. The two feel closely linked; I find being in touch with the creative processes of making art is necessary to work as an art therapist. It seems important to understand what it can mean to start any piece of artwork, which involves a risky step into the unknown. My artwork is often an attempt to understand the things that preoccupy me, and bring not quite conscious processes to awareness.
My work for the last two exhibitions (below) explored the material processes of contact printing using found objects, string, wool, hair and feathers. I was interested in the idea of an imprint left on the paper where the object had been - the repetitive marks are like traces or ghosts of the original object. Themes of absence and presence have often arisen in my work, whether through printmaking or ceramics.
In A Void (2018) I continue with these themes, and with a search for connection. In this work I explore photography as a medium, or process, by which we try to capture what is important to us. Photography takes a moment in time and crystallises it, preserving it, yet at the same time the picture is a reminder that moment is gone. I was interested in photographs that are ‘mistakes’: pictures that don't quite work out and are tucked away at the back of the family album. Today instead of an album I have a phone full of pictures, the ‘accidents’ I haven't got round to deleting. In my work for A Void (2018) I've focused on half captured moments between mothers and children, which span the generations. I also reference Winnicott’s (1971) ideas of transitional objects, halfway between ‘me’ and ‘not me’ or between baby and mother, and part of the process of separation between mother and child.