With over forty years experience as a knitter, an undergraduate degree in Fine Art (1998) and a Masters Degree in Knitting (2018), my practice combines conceptual art and craft skills to explore social narratives of place, the materials associated with women’s histories and the storytelling potential of knitting.

Between 2015-2019, my projects were inspired by traditional Shetland knitted lace and the lives of women who lived in abandoned croft houses in Shetland, a remote island off the coast of mainland Scotland. I experimented with developing traditional lace patterns to produce large-scale, intricate knitted lace panels, which I installed in windows and doorways of abandoned vernacular croft houses on the island to make site-specific photographic works as a testament to the women that had lived there long ago.

In September 2020, this project provoked profound personal and creative change. I left my home in the city of Sheffield in northern England and moved 1,000 miles to live in a 200 year old Shetland croft house by the sea. I began to research the life of one of its previous female occupants, Susan (Cissie) who had lived in the house for 83 years, from birth in 1877 till her death in 1960. From this, I developed knitted designs which were inspired by both our lives on the island, and which came about through paying attention to its distinctive landscape and rich cultural heritage. As a result of this experience, I developed innovative colour blending skills for traditional knitted textiles, which continue into my current work. While living on the island, I made a daily practice of writing and researching, which culminated in me writing a book on ‘My Shetland Life’.

In October 2021, I returned to Sheffield where I now draw on my Shetland experience to create intricate knitted pieces and to teach colour blending workshops in Fair Isle knitting to an online international audience.

I am currently focusing on a new body of artistic work called ‘I Cannot Reach You’. It is a conceptual knitwear project about the relationship between sisters which explores the gaps in a relationship, what clothes and colours mean to and say of the wearer and the expression of art through wearable hand knitted items.