I've loved making pictures since I was a small child. The story is told that when I was just two years old, I got hold of some magazine cutouts of hats that my mother had glued onto plain white cards for a dinner party game (these were popular in the 1950s and 60s). My mother was astonished to find me blissfully drawing a different face under every hat. When I was in my twenties, I learned about design principles and colour at the School of Colour & Design in Sydney, and began painting in acrylics and creating mixed media collages. Later, working as a counsellor in inner-city Adelaide, I learned mosaic-making as a way to de-stress on my weekends at home. I fell in love with this medium. It is utterly obsessive. I have been making mosaics or about six years now, mainly as gifts and commissions, but I also sell my work at local galleries and markets in the Fleurieu Peninsula region of South Australia. Many of my pieces are inspired by plants, animals, birds, and insects in my garden, in the bush, or on the seashore. Others may be influenced by the work of other artists , notably Australian painter and printmaker Margaret Preston (see the Flowerbox decorative mosaics), and European modernists like Henri Matisse (Music) and Paul Klee (Red Fish, this page).
Colour, line and texture are vital elements in mosaics. The qualities of my materials - which include natural slate from the Willunga region, Mexican and Italian smalti, stained glass, found objects, broken china, and pebbles - are a guiding force. For example, cutting with the natural faultlines of glass or stone gives a more graceful line than imposing shapes on the material. When designing a work on slate, I use lines, colours and textures that complement those of the particular piece of stone. Sometimes the material itself suggests the subject matter.
My wish is that when people see my work, they get as much pleasure as I do in dreaming, designing and making it.
