My pictures  allow me to share my stories and ideas by using paint in a contemporary way.

Before I had children and learnt to raise them – a strange mix of nature, nurture, pleasure and survival – I had another perspective and interest. I wanted to paint and record the here and now, objectively and brightly, looking at the philosophical and physical. This relationship proved my existence.

I no longer need this affirmation. Since having children, I have observed and embraced the domestic and I like the idea of bringing the ordinary alive. Now I paint what I feel and observe. I like to make visible the invisible, describing the unseen connections. The more I look, the more I see. I want to promote and inspire people to look harder and deeper.I like to paint about things, the stories behinds things, the dark things, the light things, the stories about things. About life, death and everything in between.

I enjoy the immediacy of paint, the marks it allows me to make. It is portable and can be manipulated in so many different ways. I feel I’ve only just scratched the surface of what I might do with it. Painting takes the three-dimensional and puts it on a single plane; in a single moment you see what the artist sees.

My wish to tell stories is deeply ingrained: stories from childhood, the stories I hear now and have told my children; the wonder of nature, the remarkable nature of trees, my motif – utopias where nature is in harmony, even when a storm rages. What makes us happy or sad, is beauty the instigator of happiness, do perfect people make perfect places?

Larissa MacFarquhar talks about how her work is motivated by a desire to place her readers inside someone’s head, to see what they see and to think how they think. Marina Warner talks about fairytales. Knowledge, ancient truths handed down, images conjured though words. Mary Oliver believed in nature and embraced it in her poetry, explaining things in simple words for everyone to grasp. She wrote about pain: “Someone I once loved gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift.”

I like to walk. I have been walking though London this winter in the dark with my children. The darkness is magical. I have been looking at the Shard on the skyline. The more I look, the more interesting it becomes. We all build on this earth under the same sky. There is a life force that connects the earth with the sky though the trees and buildings. I watch the energy flow back and forth, it is very clear in the darkness. In the dark, the stars seem closer.