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.
August 6th 2026 - Granny Graffiti – A Wall That Tells Our Story
Three weeks have somehow disappeared since the last blog post.
Not because nothing has happened, but because everything has happened at once.
Sometimes making art doesn’t begin with paint. Sometimes it begins by moving furniture, emptying cupboards, carrying shelves, and wondering why on earth I thought changing five rooms at once was a sensible idea.
Before I even began the graffiti, the house itself became a project. Five rooms were reorganised all at once. The workshop gained more space, I finally created a small area for my own work, the office was separated from the rest of the house, a combined living and guest room took shape, and, at last, I can now work on the small private dining room. It was an enormous amount of work, but it was all part of creating a home that works for us.
The graffiti belongs to that transformation.
It will fill a part of the wall of the new dining room, becoming part of the everyday backdrop of family meals, conversations and celebrations. It isn’t intended to impress visitors or imitate the bold statements of street art. Instead, it is becoming something far more personal—a visual autobiography told in the language of graffiti.
It celebrates who we are, where we have come from, the people we love, the next generations growing up around us, and the countless little things that have shaped our lives.
Nothing has been chosen simply because it looks good.
Everything has a reason for being there.
Pippi Longstocking is a reminder of childhood independence, courage and imagination. The Jellycat rabbit is rather special. It happens to be the favourite comfort toy of both my granddaughters, despite there being twelve years between them. One fell in love with the cream-coloured rabbit, the other with the blue one, so it seemed only right that their comforter should carry both colours. Stitch makes me smile because his whole philosophy is simple: 'Family: Nobody gets left behind'. The sword will find its place because one of our grandchildren is Arthur. I am planning a kestrel, as it is part of my earliest memories. Carrying a kestrel for the family business of The Falconry Of Ireland, Clonmel at the age of three, and learning from my grandfather how to deeply observe to get know the bird. One of his mottos always was 'if it's worth doing, then it might as well be done right'. I still carry this inside me.
Other elements are still waiting their turn. Some already exist on the wall; others are still quietly forming in my imagination.
The word PEACE sits close to the centre. Not as a slogan, but as something worth striving for within a family, within a home, and what we have been lucky enough to experience in our generation, in Europe at least - so far for our life time. Fingers crossed it will continue, for the next generations to come too.
At the moment it probably looks rather chaotic.
That is because it is.
Graffiti, like many paintings, often grows one thought at a time. Mine is doing exactly that. Background colours are still changing. Some areas have already disappeared beneath new layers. Others will almost certainly be painted over before I am satisfied. The wall is still finding its own balance., and I my way with spray paint !
For me, that uncertainty is part of making art.
The finished painting is only one moment in a much longer conversation.
Perhaps that is why Dialogue in Flux continues to feel like the right name for my work. The dialogue isn’t only within a painting. It happens between memories and ideas, between one generation and the next, between past and present. It continues while the work is being made, and it doesn’t stop when the painting is finished. Every person who stands in front of it brings something of themselves and discovers something different.
This wall is no exception.
It is not really a graffiti wall.
It is a collection of memories, values, humour, influences, family stories and small moments of joy, all slowly finding their place alongside one another. It is growing much as families do - not according to a plan drawn on day one, but one layer at a time.
So this isn’t a post about a completed artwork.
It is simply a snapshot of a wall that is still becoming itself.
I’ll show you where it ends up.
But first, it still has quite a journey ahead.
