On Painting.

Starting an MA in Fine Art back in September 2025 was a leap of faith. Winchester School of Art was finally offering a part time course and it seemed a great opportunity to reclaim time for my own work, step back into my own identity away from just being ‘mum’ and further my career in art. I joined with a bursary and it proved to be the perfect place for soul searching on my practice and my progress as an artist. I wasn’t sure if I wanted the MA to be a deep dive into my established socially engaged practice – there’s so much to research in this area and I could focus on my Little Sheds project and other ventures involving the local community. Or should I find out where the evolving themes and methods of creating in my own practice would take me? By December, I was clear that I wanted to make my own work and importantly for me, get into painting.

I have always, at least thus far, explored materials for their materiality.  Not for the depictions they make. It is always more about how they make me feel when I’m using them. For me, like many others, painting comes with a whole bag of trauma.  Likely from school times where I felt inept and unable to express myself. At the end of my first year in BA Fine Art (2008), we had to choose the department in which our studio would be located.   All those times I had been up to see friends in the Paint studio my heart soared with excitement and yet I chose first Printmaking and then, a year later, upon feeling contained in an office-like studio (next to the Print Room) I moved to Sculpture with its lofty ceiling and crazy disarray of objects and materials oozing or blocking doors or hanging down – all in the name of unbridled creativity. It was a huge relief and although I continued to produce work in print, video and sculpture, this messy studio was definitely the one for me. 

So in the MA, in a nice messy studio, I took a large canvas and pinned it to the wall, found a random image of a snow leopard and got going in the studio. I was less interested in the subject matter and more keen to experience the canvas, the paint and well, just the process. It was a studio exercise and not one that I intended to display publicly, as later happened. The image came from a book I had found in a book cupboard on the roadside. It was a heart-warming tale of a mother leopard dedicated to teaching her young charge all about life right through to her final day, when the young snow leopard then took on the mantle and leapt out into the night. The images were moving to say the least and it made an emotional read. It struck such a chord with my current situation being an older mother with a young child experiencing difficulties at school and the teaching and care required to ensure her wellbeing. But what I hadn’t realised is that this image was the stunning work of a well-known artist and author, Jackie Morris, who generously not only forgave me this plagiarism when I contacted her on Instagram but went on to reply personally by letter enclosing as well a beautiful image that she had painted herself. Such generosity of spirit that really spurred me on.

As an artist, I always like to have several things on the go and I simultaneously dipped into ceramics, which was not totally new to me but I certainly hadn’t explored it as I did this time: for tactile experimentation and to experience allowing form to develop and speak in its own way. As issues with childcare became more and more pressing, I struggled to fit in constant visits to school with the studies and assignments of the MA. I was however able to arrive at the university after 6pm when my partner got home and use the clay studio and potter’s wheel to experiment and take time out from demands of motherhood and home. By January 2026, it was clear that these demands were not going to go away without some significant input from myself and I paused the MA. The following month my child fell out of school and entered a distressing phase of severe burnout. Together we began this rough journey that we remain on today, exiting a system we had assumed would support us and navigating the world by ourselves.    We became Home Ed.  It would take us 6 challenging months to make a start in finding our feet but with very little other choice open to us, we did exactly that.