Art as Transformation
Art has always been more than expression for me, it has been the anchor for restoration, resilience, and survival. Creative transformation became the companion that carried me through some of the most turbulent chapters of my life.
Growing up with both parents struggling with alcohol addiction meant living with chronic instability and what I later understood as anticipatory grief: the slow, accumulating sorrow of waiting for an inevitable loss. It carries the same emotional weight as grief after a death, sadness, anger, anxiety, guilt yet it unfolds slowly while the person is still alive.
At school, I was labelled “stupid” by teachers and by my parents. Misunderstood at precisely the moment I needed to be seen clearly. While language and support were absent, art created a pathway through. I excelled in art, needlework, and photography; although I left school without the expected academic subjects, creative problem-solving and material thinking became the threads that held me together.
My foundation course in Banbury was not just an education, it was a repair. Every sketch, stitch, and photograph became a method of processing all that had shaped me. As I moved into early adulthood, held in the contrasting forces of care and harm, responsibility and loss, making helped me interpret experience and reclaim a sense of self. Silversmithing gave form to emotions I didn’t yet have words for; knitting for my children created rhythm, safety, and continuity. Creativity became the anchor I returned to repeatedly.
Motherhood, Bereavement, and the Unmaking of Identity
Motherhood brought both expansion and weight—emotionally, physically, and symbolically. The deaths of both parents, close together, unearthed years of buried emotion and forced a confrontation with histories I had survived rather than processed. While clearing their belongings, I found my mother’s Open College of the Arts materials, an unexpected symbolic transfer. Enrolling in the OCA textiles degree allowed me to stitch healing directly into form. Graduating with the first-ever first-class honours degree on that programme was more than an academic achievement; it dismantled a long-standing narrative of inadequacy that had shadowed me since childhood.
During these years, the emotional landscape was mirrored physically. Motherhood, chronic stress, grief, and long periods of self-neglect had accumulated in the body. In 2020, alongside deep internal work and rebuilding my life, I lost six stone naturally. The weight loss was transformative, but it also revealed something else—an apron of excess skin, a physical trace of the years I had endured. Choosing to have a tummy tuck to remove this was not a cosmetic decision; it was a reclamation of agency over my own body, a symbolic shedding of what no longer belonged to me. It marked a turning point in how I understood embodiment, autonomy, and self-worth.
This stage of life, motherhood, loss, physical change, and the remaking of identity, is an experience many midlife women recognise. It is a profound threshold, and my creative practice became both witness and companion through it.
Transition, Agency, and Creative Renewal
Divorce brought rupture and release. Watching my children leave home introduced another shift in identity, one familiar to many women at midlife. More recently, redundancy from my role at Crisis marked the end of a long chapter rooted in community care and social impact. Each transition, painful, disorienting, and often liberating, confirmed what I know with certainty: creative practice is not a luxury; it is a lifeline during profound change.
Today, my work is not about erasing the past but reclaiming agency within it. Through sculpture, textiles, pewter casting, and socially engaged practice, I transform difficult histories into tactile, resonant forms. When I teach, through exhibitions, workshops, and one-to-one sessions, I do so with the knowledge that creative ritual and meaningful objects can redraw the fractured self into something grounded, resilient, and powerful.
The Origin of Shifting States
Shifting States emerged directly from this lived experience.
It reflects a belief shaped by decades of personal and creative transformation: that women navigating midlife’s thresholds can use creative ritual, material engagement, and object-making to anchor themselves, honour their stories, and step into a new sense of becoming.
It is the culmination of everything I have lived, learned, and created, rooted in artistic inquiry, embodied knowledge, and the quiet strength that grows from transforming what once felt overwhelming into something purposeful, beautiful, and deeply one’s own.