An artist-printmaker and poet, my work explores becoming, or what I refer to in my poetry as moment — the fluid, transitory nature of happenings and things.

I am drawn to the sea by its borderlessness, its movement, its reshaping of itself, and am drawn too to islands which, on the face of it, offer themselves as havens, holding places, points of fixity or ‘punctuations in the sea’s gnarled page’.  Words (a substance beneath which meaning constantly slips — in much the same way as the sea slips beneath its skin) play an important role in my visual art and, more obviously, in my poetry.

I work predominantly in linocut and wood engraving, and in monochrome.  The restricted palette is a challenge in that tone, together with differences in form, can only be achieved through black, white, and (by illusion) grey.  As a result, the accent for me as a maker is on the mark.  The surfaces I work are flat, naked, darkened blocks that I sculpt with small marks — lines and dots which separate dark from light, lines which cut over the lines I have previously made and which in so doing erase.  The process is, in many ways, archaelogical — a digging down to find things, with the concomitant destruction of what was dug.  It is also perverse.  What is to the right on the block as I engrave appears on the left in the printed work, and only the untouched, unmarked surface takes the ink.  The naked remains.

When working lino, I default to a small v-gouge; I use mainly a graver and tints when engraving wood.  On both surfaces I make inumerable marks.  By contrast, I reduce the mark to a minimum in my poetry.  Poems are affordances — they open up possibilities — and by paring the word and giving it room to breathe, the affordances increase.  My poems have been appearing in literary magazines and in the national press for some thirty years.  Printmaking is something that I have turned to more recently.

I was born in Bethesda, North Wales, grew up in Reading, England, trained as an architect at the Welsh School of Architecture and then went into architectural history, social work, language teaching, and higher education.  I first explored printmaking as a process at the tail-end of the pandemic when I was looking for a change of direction having lost my job through redundancy.  Cutting and pulling my first print was revelatory: I felt I had come upon something lost long ago and deep within myself.  I keep digging.

I currently live in Llanfairfechan, near Conwy, and am a member of the North Wales Society of Fine Art and Aberystwyth Printmakers.

Exhibitions

• Ironbridge Fine Arts Printmaking Competition 2024, 8 September - 16 November.

• Tabernacle Art Competion 2024: On a windy day, MOMA Machynlleth, 22 June - 4 September, 2024.

• North Wales Society of Fine Art Members’ Exhibition, Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead, 26 June - 20 July, 2024.

• Derby Print Open 2024, Derby, 1-30 June 2024.

• Ffocws #1, Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno. March 23 - June 22, 2024.

• Trawsffurfiad / Transformation, Plas Brondanw 2024 Open. March - May, 2024.

• Open Exhibition 2024, The Royal Cambrian Academy, Conwy. January - February, 2024.

• Ar yr Ymylon / Outside Edges, Oriel Ty Meirion, Dyffryn Ardudwy. November 2023 - February 2024.

• Llanw a Thrai / Turning Tide, Oriel Ty Meirion, Dyffryn Ardudwy. August - October 2023.

• Derby Print Open 2023, Bank Mills Studios, Derby. June 2023.

• Mostyn, Llandudno, a showcase of recent work. March - June 2023.

• Open Exhibition 2023, The Royal Cambrian Academy, Conwy. January - April 2023.

Poetry

In PN Review, Stand, and other journals. For a full list of poems published over the last few years, head over to Poems