I spent more than 20 years working in fashion, creating designer womenswear and specialising in pattern making. My days were built around precision. Drawing perfect lines, working with proportion, construction and form.

Painting has given me a different kind of freedom.

I rarely begin with a fixed idea of exactly where a painting will end up. I work intuitively, building layers of oil, translucent colour and drawn marks, then scraping back, obscuring and reworking what is there. Some decisions are deliberate, others happen by accident. I’ve learned not to resolve those accidents too quickly, often they are what take the painting somewhere unexpected.

There are traces of my fashion background throughout my work. Lines can feel like seams, shapes like fragments of a pattern or a fold in fabric. That visual language comes naturally after so many years of working with it, but now I’m interested in disrupting the precision rather than perfecting it.

There is usually a point in every painting when I stop trying to control it and start responding to what is actually happening on the canvas. I add something, remove something, cover an area I thought I loved. Somewhere in that process, the painting begins to reveal itself, and I start to understand what it wants to become. The painting gradually finds its own balance between structure and spontaneity.

For me, that is the most exciting part, starting with the instinct to draw the perfect line, then giving myself permission to let it wander