Archipelago.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to live on a volcanic island. I grew up in Thurstonland, a tiny village nestled atop a small hill within the gloomy Pennines of West Yorkshire. I used to draw all the time, like a lot of kids do. Fantastical places, prehistoric landscapes with wild animals and sparkling seas full of colourful creatures. There was this image I remember vividly, a white house set on the shore of a red and black craggy island, with palms trees and tropical flowers, whales and exotic fish.

I lived most of my adult life in Leeds, using it as a base to explore as much of the world as I could whilst trying to learn how to be a painter. After finishing a degree in fine art I spent a year at Cyprus College of Art and went on to complete residencies in Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Spain and Holland. Then I started writing music and formed a band, which took me down a different creative route for 10 years.

In my mid-thirties, I wanted a child of my own. I couldn’t imagine having kids in West Yorkshire, as I had this intense desire to find the volcanic island from my childhood drawings, and I still hadn’t found it. My partner and I moved to Lanzarote. Inspired by our own experiences as resident artists in different countries, we wanted to run our own residency project there, a place for musicians and artists to work away from the urban environment. I discovered I was pregnant only a month after moving to the island, and for the first time in my life I felt really afraid. Pregnancy changed me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. The island suddenly felt like a hostile, alien and very lonely place. Compounding this feeling was a string of events - some really traumatic - that occurred during my pregnancy, and we returned to the UK just before my daughter was born. 4 years later, I find myself living in Denby Dale (not far from Thurstonland) and also have a son. My days are totally consumed by motherhood, but I find tiny fragments of time during each week to make images. This is a strange, sudden transition; most of my life has been spent making things, and in my own time. Now I rarely find a moment to be the person I used to be. This is how I began printing. I no longer have a studio so it has been a way to make small multi-layered images on the kitchen table whilst looking after a baby and a toddler. But it has granted me the freedom to explore the formal and conceptual elements that I think were left unresolved in my paintings. I usually use a reduction lino technique and try to experiment with other printing techniques within the same image. This means that all my prints are unique and I rarely find myself with two prints that look the same.

For the last year I have been looking back at drawings and photographs I made during the brief life I had on my volcano, and the other volcanic islands I visited within the Canarian archipelago. Working through my experiences has been a kind of therapy for all that went wrong during that time, but I am also trying to understand what that particular part of the world actually means to me, and where to go from here. It feels like I am the child again making images of her fantasy island life, but this time from the other side of actually experiencing it, and through the eyes of a mother watching her own children grow, wondering if my fantasy should be their reality. I can’t help but view this chain of interlinked experiences as an archipelago in itself.

I approached printing with the intention to eventually make large scale paintings from them, but now I also see my prints as works in their own right.