After spending more than three decades working in the corporate world, I made the decision to step away and follow a long-held instinct toward creating. That shift was not a romantic leap, but a conscious recalibration, one rooted in lived experience, observation, and a growing awareness of how language, power, and gender shape women’s lives.

 

My route into the art world has been challenging at times, unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and occasionally destabilising, but it has also been deeply liberating. Moving from a results-driven corporate environment into a space that values reflection, uncertainty, and critical thinking has required me to unlearn habits of perfectionism and control, and to become more open to vulnerability, risk, and failure. This process now sits at the core of my practice.

 

Earlier in my life, a serious illness with a hereditary risk shaped my sense of time and expectation. For many years I believed I would not live beyond my mid-forties, and I structured my life accordingly. Now, in good health and with a renewed sense of agency, I work with a heightened awareness of urgency, presence, and purpose. Making feels less like a choice and more like a responsibility, an opportunity to give form to what has too often gone unspoken.

 

I am currently a mature student studying Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, where my work focuses on text, ceramics, and installation. My practice draws on real language and lived experience, exploring how words shape behaviour, identity, and power over time. Through materially driven processes, I aim to slow language down, hold it in place, and invite reflection on what is said, repeated, and normalised.

 

Returning to education later in life has been both grounding and transformative. It has confirmed that constraint, when examined critically, can become a route to freedom and that making work rooted in honesty, discomfort, and care can open meaningful conversations about how we live, speak, and relate to one another.

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