The art had to change too.

I changed my surroundings, and somewhere along the way I realised that my old way of making art didn’t really belong to this version of my life anymore. Which, if I’m honest, was something I was slightly petrified of happening.As artists, we’re fed this old narrative that we need to find our thing and stick to it. One style. One recognisable look. Make yourself easy to identify, easy to sell, easy for galleries to understand. And once you’ve found it, for God’s sake don’t start messing around with it. I think I resisted changing for quite a long time because of that.

Because we all want to be accepted into the group, don’t we? We all want to be liked, deep down. Even those of us who like to pretend we don’t care. But while I was worrying about what my art was supposed to look like, pretty much everything else in my life had changed. My surroundings were different. My priorities were different. I was different. So perhaps it was inevitable that the work would eventually have to catch up. One thing I was absolutely certain about was that I didn’t want to rent studio space anymore. I’d done the costs, the paperwork, the landlords and the uncertainty. I didn’t want any of it. I wanted total control over my space. Somewhere I could wander into with a cup of tea, make a mess, leave everything exactly where it was and shut the door at the end of the day.

So, naturally, I decided to build a studio at the bottom of the garden

At exactly the same time as renovating the house.

Excellent decision.

Living with builders, brick dust and half a house is quite exciting for approximately five minutes, and then you realise everything you own is covered in a very fine layer of something and you can’t remember which box contains the thing you need. Thankfully, the studio was the first thing to be finished, which turned out to be genius timing because it became something of an escape room while the house was being knocked about. Work started in March and for the next few months I poured pretty much all of my time, energy into making the house and studio feel like a sanctuary.

And I didn’t paint for four months.

At first, I worried about that too. Four months feels like a very long time when making art is also your job. There’s always that little voice telling you that you should be producing something, posting something, keeping up, staying visible. But I think I needed the gap. Because while I wasn’t painting, I was still creating. I was choosing colours for walls. Thinking about light. Moving furniture around. Looking at old tiles and fireplaces and all the slightly wonky bits of an old house. I was learning about the history of where I lived and spending more time in the garden.

This house and garden have so much history and quirkiness to them. It’s the sort of place I always imagined myself living in without really knowing that I did. Eventually, all of that started leaking into the work.

The nostalgia. Folklore. Flowers. Childhood wonder. Old things. Little stories. The slightly strange and whimsical. When I finally went back into the studio and started painting again, I didn’t particularly want to make the work I had been making before.

I wanted to make this.

I think our environments shape us far more than we realise. The places we spend our days seep into us. And when you work from home, and spend a lot of your life there, feeling content and inspired by your surroundings becomes even more important. Maybe changing my home gave me permission to change my work too.

So now I’m slowly painting a new body of work that feels a world away from the “old me”.

Strangely, despite it being new and despite me still having absolutely no idea where it might eventually lead, it might be the most aligned I’ve ever felt with my work. I’m still figuring it out. It might change again. In fact, I hope it does.