I draw almost every day, using a dip pen and ink on both paper and canvas, often on a large scale with some pieces as big as 2 metres. The backgrounds are dark and swampy with pools of ethereal white ink, floating gold pigments and shards of glass.

My work is immersed in the natural world and under the sea where I am obsessed by jellyfish, corals and sea urchins. I try to capture them alone in the deep, dark, vast seas and they seem to represent something to me about how we are in our world too. They drift onto the canvas out of the dark, intricate and delicate, like lace. In my work, they aren’t anatomically correct, I don’t research them, they swim through my imagination where they float out of the gloom, beautiful and ethereal in white ink. I want my paintings to have the impression of looking through the sea to the floor. While I have been on this underwater journey my work has also evolved. I have introduced textures using dry pigments and thick layers of ink that crack, and chemical reactions between inks and metallic pigments. I draw over the cracks and create a fragile, fractured feel.

Occasionally I come up for air! My studio is surrounded by oak trees and I they have crept into my work in the form of small, intense drawings.