Personal Statement

As an international educator, with over thirty years’ experience of teaching in disparate countries and continents throughout the world, I seek to draw my inspiration from my current location, ensuring that I use my experiences and environment to inform my themes and invigorate my subject matter, as well as to source locally available art materials. 
   
Each time I have relocated to a new country, my life has been thrown into an upheaval, punctuated by ‘good-byes’ and the need to process multi-layered losses. Whilst adjusting to my relocation to Lomé, Togo, in 2022, I was deeply impacted by the sudden spate of tree felling within my immediate neighborhood. Although I am concerned about the rapid denuding of West Africa, I came to realize that my strong reactions to the delimbing and felling of trees was a metaphorical response to my grief and sense of powerlessness in my dealing with the losses I cyclically experience each time I move countries. 

​

This realization precipitated my research into the widespread losses experienced by expatriates during and after the transition process. Additionally, I sought to understand the processes that facilitate expatriates to deal with these losses, achieve mental stability and foster hope. The result of this research undergirds the themes, subject matter and words expressed in my current artwork.

​

Through my art I seek to raise people’s awareness of the losses involved in an expatriate’s nomadic lifestyle and to help viewers, as well as my research participants, to Return to Find Meaning in their loss, facilitating the restoration of hope. From the ashes of loss, new life and light will break through.

​

My artistic strengths lie in the creation of mixed media drawings; the use of rejectamenta in bricolage artworks, installations, and sculptures; as well as graphic design campaigns and publications. As part of my concern for sustainability, my media and supports comprise predominantly of repurposed found objects and locally sourced materials, e.g., West African fabric offcuts, packaging and discarded natural plant matter.