How would you describe your making process? Do you use your energy and time to produce work alongside your illness? What spaces and places do you make in?

Serious illness has been a very recent development in my life and I am still learning to accept it, rather than deny the impact. The illness itself has gone (for now), but debris remains in the form of fatigue. It can be a real drag because often my capacity and my desire to work don’t match so patience is needed -the alternative being what I term over-cooking myself; never a good place to end up in. Someone once said that serious illness could be seen as a sort of Renaissance which is a much more positive, and kinder, way of looking at things. Illness was certainly not something I’d have chosen, but it was one of the most interesting journeys that I’ve undertaken and has given me a sea of materials to sift through, creating new directions in my practice.

I used to consider myself as a painter, but since my illness, painting seems to be of less interest to me. Now I use a lot of different methods to play with the experience of illness. Working on a laptop may be less exciting than squirting colours out of the tube, but it’s where things are at the moment. On the plus side, I no longer stink of turps at the end of the day.

Making-wise I have the advantage that everything is on the doorstep. My studio is in the attic, so going up ten steps is all that’s needed to be there - although on some days that feels like a long way. Most of my work goes on there, sometimes it’s enough to sit in the space and do nothing, just a bit of thinking, which is all part of the process.