Studio Atlantic is where I think out loud.
I am an artist working mainly with a camera, although I came to photography via a slightly circuitous route. My first creative life involved paint and I spent many years trying, with mixed results, to make work that lived up to what was in my head. It rarely did. I put the brushes away and assumed that chapter was over.
It wasn't. It had simply gone underground, waiting for a different tool.
I learned about photography as a young teenager and returned to it some 30 years later. I very quickly realised I had no interest in the camera as a recording device. What was tugging at my sleeve was a murky middle ground where photography and painting overlap - flat, abstract renditions; colour as feeling; shape and gesture not literal description. Intentional camera movement and multiple exposure enable me to use my camera more like a paintbrush.
I also need to get my hands dirty. Paint. Pastel. Collage. Collagraph. Printmaking as a way to move beyond the limitless and easy reproduction of the digital file.
I have published two books –Fragile (Triplekite, 2017) and We May As Well Dance (Kozu Books, 2021) and exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic.
I am also involved in a teaching life I did not plan but now would not be without. With Doug Chinnery I co-run Find Your Voice, a community for photographers who want to move beyond the descriptive image.
In June 2026 I moved from East Sussex to the Silver Coast of Portugal. The Atlantic is at the end of the garden now. The light here is not the light I knew in southern England — silver, salt-washed, unrepeatable from one hour to the next. The coastline shifts. The waves are with me day and night. The weather has attitude, and it asks a different kind of looking. I am still learning to meet it.
Studio Atlantic is where I try to make sense of all of this — in words, in images, in process. It runs in three loose rooms.
TO WANDER & WONDER. The walking and the thinking that comes back with it. Place, light, the awkward language of being an immigrant, the things that turn over in the head on a long beach.
WORKING. What happens on the table. Cold wax, kozo paper, collagraph, gold leaf, the slow business of finishing a piece by hand. Decisions, mistakes, the next decision.
THE IMAGE ROOM. Pictures, mostly. Residues of light and time along the coast. The ideas that hung around long enough to take form.
I am wary of the word blog. It suggests something more disposable than I intend. These are notes from a working studio, written by someone still searching. Exploring, not explaining.
If any of it speaks to you, I would be glad of the company.