Solo show at QPAC

How was your summer? Relaxing I hope? Mine was fairly chaotic, due in part to the mad scramble to prepare for my very first solo show, at Queens Park Art Centre in Aylesbury. This was such a fabulous opportunity and I’m so pleased, excited and proud to have my work out there, in front of your actual eyeballs. It’s been lovely to hear feedback from people who had only ever seen my work online, usually in the little squares of Instagram, to hear how they interacted with the textures and the movement, how the gold spoke to them in ways they didn’t expect. I’ve learnt a lot from this process and I hope I’ll have the opportunity to put on more exhibitions in the future.

The most self indulgent piece in my exhibition is this mobile I made, called ‘Inheritance words; a family love language’. It’s a collection of words and phrases spoken throughout my childhood and passed on to my children. It’s not complete by any means, more phrases keep coming back to me, and maybe one day I’ll do part two. It’s also not actualised in the way I had imagined. The truth is that I ran out of time, it was the school holidays and I also had to be mindful that time is money - I simply couldn’t devote the time it would have taken to make the mobile that lives in my head. But nevertheless it was a deeply emotional experience. Grief and gratitude and love. Casual lettering is a style that causes me enormous angst and, occasionally, deep satisfaction. I painted it during the week that I heard that dear @dappersigns had died. His burger van casual was one of the first things I fell in love with when I first got into signwriting, so it felt even more poignant to be painting these words in this style at this time. If you’d like to see the mobile IRL it’ll be at @queensparkarts until 21 Sep. And if you’re curious about the phrases drop me a message ♥️