A lot has happened in the past couple of months and a lot of questions have been asked and answered and some remain in that twilight zone of “working on it”… Art is like an idea which you can’t quite pin down but you know would be great if you ever could. And socially engaged…

While out saying Hello and leafletting in the flats, we knocked on David’s door and he kindly invited us into his top floor flat. David gets to look at an amazing view of hills and sunsets as often as he likes (or can). It’s the best flat he’s had he says and he has had…

In late July 2021 I joined the WWDN project with The Stove Network, Dumfries, as an artist working with the community of Dunlop Road in Lochside, NW Dumfries. This is the first blog documenting my work and impressions from the early establishing weeks/months. There will be more as the project develops… The project is part…

There is a romantic idea that glass is a very slow-moving liquid which travels downwards due to gravity over a number of centuries in old church windows making them thicker at the bottom than the top…sadly the truth is closer to defining it as an amorphous solid which lacks the orderly molecular structure of other…

The end of new normal is in sight and we can begin to live more easily with the mask and the distance, knowing it will come to an end. The idea of normal hoves into view for many of us but it seems a bit stranger than expected, can we really expect life to be…

We are better connected than we were three months ago, but we don’t really know the pathway through the next three and beyond. The Market Festival in Dumfries last Saturday was full of communal joy and genuine bonhomie but behind the mask we aren’t quite sure how long this spell of almost normality will last…we…

Rolling directly into my sketch book as preliminary work for Elsewhere, a project for The Stove Network in Dumfries, I found myself wondering where the roller would go, what it would do, how much ink it would deposit, what textures it would create, when it would run out of ink, how long I will believe…

Returning to life after lockdown involves an ever-increasing pattern of overlapping life shapes and patterns, combinations of over and under, beside and between, distant and closer, safer and less safe, trusting and risky, aimless and purposeful, peaceful and agitated, knowing and unknowing, hopeful and disturbed, relieved and edgy, banal and fantastic, comfortable and prickly, proactive…

Having lived a strange, slightly edgy existence for several months, we are starting to know and live the new normal. From separate cells of one or two, moving at a distance from other social cells in our immediate orbit, we are beginning to take more chances and get closer, with or without masks. Distances are…

Responding to these strange times we are all living through right now, I found myself manipulating clay into certain abstract forms which followed the shapes of the glancing movements of social distancing. We have all willingly moved out of the way of others or smiled gratefully when they have done the same for us, performing…

Between 2006 and 2018 there were several commissions for stained glass panels to be designed for various parts of the Essex college. Art and Photography tutor Andy Brooke, who was part of Colchester Glass Artists at the time, was first commissioned by College Principal Ian MacNaughton in September 2006 to create a pair of windows…

Glass and photography have had long association. Glass lenses enable the camera to ’see’. Even the daguerreotype on metal relied on a layer of glass in a frame to protect its delicate, erasable surface, and it became redundant in face of efforts to use glass as a desirable substrate for photo-sensitive materials which occupied much […]…