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Painting and drawing have always been part of my research practice. My higher education studies were in art history (MA Hons, Glasgow University), design and craft history, and material culture (PhD, Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum). Reflecting through ink, watercolour and pencil has been, and continues to be, an expansive methodology for positioning theory and written literacies in relation to the visual and spatial in my research. My interests have spanned curatorial practices, craft methodologies, pedagogies of hope, and making under politically restricted circumstances.

Since growing up in the Welsh Borders and then keenly seeking green spaces in the large cities where I have lived as an adult, relationships to landscape have been fundamental to all I do, and all I am. Painting in response to those places, as well as to my historical research, was an area I felt was private and a method of processing ideas and feelings that I was unable to reach through other means. The touch of paint and ink was necessary, vital, embodied, but not something I felt was allowed space in my visible academic life or my work in contemporary art commissioning and curating.

In late 2019, this became impossible to keep separate and I started an anonymous account on Instagram in order to record and make visible this side of my practice. I was amazed by the supportive community I found and momentum gathered. It is now an area that allows me to explore concepts of making in a time of unmaking, relationships to landscape in the Anthropocene, haptic dynamics and tensions with everyday sites and objects, connections to notions of embodiment and self, and stretch into the spaces of visual, spatial and material knowledge (and knowing) that is necessary to my teaching, research and wellbeing.

A key part of this is the sheer joy of it, the appetite to make, and the feeling that painting equips me with a vocabulary that is still unfolding.

Painting has opened up projects, collaborations, and new branches of research, with outputs such as a project with 19 makers that will result in a zine in 2023, an exhibition in Bristol 2023, talks and presentations, and research funding, as well as, most importantly, leading to relationships, friendships and ways of navigating each day.