I have spent my life creating in one way or another. My work reflects my love of nature, particularly the sea which has always played a large part in my life as I was born and brought up on the Isle of Man.
 
My work has always been collage led and I see mosaic as an extension of this, colour, shape and texture being all important. I try to bring a new approach to the ancient art of mosaic. Mosaic making is a very physical process. Each piece of coloured glass or stone is cut by hand using a hammer and hardie, the traditional mosaicist’s tools. The process I use for completing the mosaic is called the double reverse method, which I learnt in Ravenna, Italy, the historic centre of Byzantine mosaic. It involves 6 different processes. More technical info here.
 
It is always a challenge to produce work with “life” from such an un-giving medium and the limited colour palette available to me also imposes interesting constraints. The biggest obstacle to me is the length of time the work takes me to produce as I have so many pictures in my head but not enough time to create them all.  The fact that mosaic art is so ancient appeals to me, as does the tactile and organic quality of the work. Each piece of work is like a journey, beginning with an idea and ending somewhere I may not have expected. My work is not practical mosaic. I see it as painting, just in a different medium.
 
I was lucky enough to have been taught by the artist Norman Sayle R.I. who once remarked that one of his favourite things about water colour painting was the “happy accidents” that could happen. It is the same for me with mosaic as sometimes when hammering a piece of glass or stone, an amazing shape emerges and I will save it and sometimes even create a whole picture around it.