Process · Experiment · Reflection
Here's the place where I talk about ideas becoming paintings, prints, paper clay, experiments and, occasionally, complete failures. Not every piece becomes a finished artwork. Understanding that every piece teaches me something means my studio is simply brimming with work, but in the polished grid of Instagram so much of it just gets lost.
Over the years, the sheer variety of workshops I teach has also meant that my own work has gradually slipped into the visual background. From the outside it can look as though I'm mainly teaching, when in reality the two are constantly feeding one another. What I discover in my own studio inevitably finds its way into the workshops, and questions or experiments from the workshops often send me back into my own work with fresh eyes.
There are simply too many ideas, experiments, discoveries, thoughts and end results that become blanketed over by the expectation of polished social media. Yet every one of them has played its part. Every experiment, whether successful or not, leaves something behind. Sometimes it's only years later that you realise just how important it was.
For me, Dialogue in Flux isn't simply the title of a body of work. It emerged from the realisation that time doesn't really have a place in the creative process. Forty years after leaving art college, I found myself naturally returning to ways of working, marks and conversations that I hadn't consciously been pursuing, only to discover that they had never really left me.
There is a dialogue within each artwork: between colours, forms, marks, materials and the placement of every element. That dialogue gradually finds its own conclusion as a piece reaches the point where it has nothing more to say. But the conversation doesn't end there. Every finished work begins a new dialogue with the next piece, and another with every person who stands in front of it.
Looking back, I can also see that Dialogue in Flux reaches beyond the studio. It reflects a life shaped by living in Ireland, England and Germany, where each place, culture and way of seeing has left its mark. Rather than replacing one another, they continue to exist in dialogue, quietly informing not only the work I make, but the person making it.
The dialogue is never fixed. It moves between ideas, materials and finished works. It moves backwards and forwards through time, revealing connections that often only become visible years later. It continues between one artwork and the next, and begins all over again with every new viewer who brings their own experiences, memories and interpretations to the work.
This little corner of my website exists because Instagram simply isn't built for that kind of conversation. It favours polished outcomes, neat grids and finished pieces. My own studio, however, is anything but neat. It's full of unfinished work, abandoned ideas that suddenly become useful again, discoveries I hadn't been looking for, and experiments that quietly change the direction of the next painting.
So this isn't really a blog in the traditional sense. It's a place to record the conversations that happen before, during and beyond the finished artwork. A place where the experiments, the questions, the failures, the discoveries and the unexpected connections have as much value as the paintings themselves.
So, for those who are interested in what happens before a painting reaches the wall—or why one piece unexpectedly leads to another—here it is.
Welcome to my Studio Notes.
14 July 2026 - Looking Back to Move Forward.
Sometimes you only recognise a journey once you stop and look backwards.
That's exactly what happened to me this week.
Mind you, the journey itself didn't begin this week. Nor did it begin with the gelli plate.
It properly began last October, when I suddenly recognised something that had quietly been unfolding over many years and finally gave it a name: Dialogue in Flux.
Once I'd recognised it, something else happened.
I became curious.
If this really was the way I naturally work, would it survive moving from one medium to another? Would the same visual language still emerge if I stepped away from painting for a while? Could a print lead to a painting, a painting suggest another print, and both continue the same conversation?
I certainly wasn't the first artist to work like that. Picasso did. Kirchner did. Many artists have allowed one medium to feed another, moving backwards and forwards between printmaking and painting, each informing the next. Rather than seeing them as separate disciplines, they become different voices in the same conversation.
That thought stayed with me.
Ironically, my own conversation with the gelli plate had begun years earlier.
Back in 2021, a good friend made me a homemade gelli plate. I was absolutely delighted
......and then put it in the fridge.
For two years.
I was genuinely intimidated by it. Why? I honestly couldn't tell you. Somehow I'd convinced myself I needed to know what I was doing before I even started.
Eventually curiosity got the better of me.
By 2023 I was properly exploring the process and, before long, had moved on to commercial plates. Like so many people, I became completely absorbed. Layer after layer, ghost prints, stencils, masks, textures, colour, transparency, happy accidents and complete failures. Hours disappeared without me noticing.
And I loved it.
I still do.
There is something wonderfully liberating about a process that constantly surprises you. Some prints seem determined to fight back, others suddenly reveal something you couldn't possibly have planned. It is play in the very best sense of the word.
But gradually something changed.I stopped seeing the prints as the destination.
Instead, they became part of a much bigger conversation.
Over the past months I've deliberately moved backwards and forwards between printing and painting, allowing one to influence the other without worrying too much where it might lead. Sometimes a print suggested a painting. Sometimes a painting sent me back to the plate. Sometimes neither survived, but the next piece somehow carried a little of both.
That was exactly the point.
Looking around the studio now, I can see the thread far more clearly than I could while I was making the work. Some monoprints feel complete enough to stand as finished works. Others have found their place within mixed-media pieces. And then there are my recent acrylic paintings on paper. They aren't gelli plate prints at all, yet I can immediately recognise how those months of printing have influenced them. The confidence to crop harder. To simplify. To layer differently. To leave more unsaid. The influence is there, even when the plate itself isn't.
Perhaps the gelli plate didn't teach me to print quite as much as it taught me to edit.
That feels like a much bigger lesson.More importantly, it confirmed something I'd only begun to suspect last October.
Dialogue in Flux isn't tied to one technique.
It isn't about painting.It isn't about printmaking.
It isn't even about materials.It's about the conversation that happens as one idea naturally leads to the next. Sometimes that conversation takes place within a single picture. Sometimes it continues between different works. Sometimes it moves effortlessly from one medium into another before quietly returning again.
For the first time, I also feel these pieces have reached a point where I'm genuinely happy to call them fine art. Not because they're made with a particular process, but because they've found their own place within my practice. They no longer feel like experiments sitting beside the paintings. They belong alongside them.
Five years ago there was a homemade gelli plate sitting dauntingly in my fridge.
If someone had told me then that it would eventually become one voice within an ongoing artistic conversation, I'd probably have smiled politely and closed the fridge door again.
Thankfully, curiosity won.
