My studio sits within our old Cornish Manse, a house that has been added to and lived in for centuries. The oldest part dates back to the mid 1700s. It has worn wooden floorboards, and a log burner set into the old marble fireplace that keeps the room warm through the darker months. There are antique captain’s chairs draped with sheepskins, shelves of jars, dried plants and curious little objects, and usually a dog or two somewhere nearby.

It feels less like a conventional artist’s studio and more like the apothecary I always imagined having.

Jars of botanical inks and earth pigments sit alongside dried herbs, seed heads, feathers, twigs and things gathered on walks. Other shelves hold objects that belonged to my parents and grandparents, old brass weights, photographs and my grandfather’s brass trumpet mouthpiece. I made an altar with candles and small found things, and the remains of plants that were once brought in for their colour or shape, but became too beautiful to throw away.

And in the middle of it all is an old oak table.

When I was a teenager, my dad taught photography at Harrogate Art College. During a renovation, the old wooden studio tables were being thrown into a skip to make way for new fittings. With permission, Dad rescued one, brought it home and my Mum lovingly restored it.

For the next forty years, it was our family dining table.

It held Christmas dinners and Sunday roasts, birthday cakes and cups of tea. People gathered around it for celebrations, conversations and difficult days. It witnessed engagements and weddings, babies arriving and grandchildren growing up. There was laughter, loss, ordinary Tuesday evenings and all the countless moments in between that make up a family life.

When my parents died two years ago, the table came home with me to Cornwall.

Now it stands in my studio.

After more than forty years of holding our family, this enormous old oak table has somehow found its way back to where it began, supporting an artist.

It is where I grind pigments, mix inks, draw, paint, make mistakes and begin again. Its surface carries the marks of its first life in an art college, the traces of decades spent at the centre of our family, and now the spills, scratches and stains of my own practice.

There is something about that circularity that means everything to me.

So much of my work is about the way memory settles into places and objects; how something seemingly ordinary can gather meaning simply by being present as life happens around it. I don’t think I could have found a better embodiment of that idea if I’d tried.

And perhaps it’s no coincidence that some of the work I feel closest to has been made on that table.

My studio is where all these threads seem to meet,
family and landscape,
past and present,
ritual and the everyday.

In winter the fire burns, jars and plants gather on the shelves, muddy dogs wander through, and the old oak table waits in the middle of the room.
Still holding things.

Only now, it holds the work too.