I would like to thank Mission Gallery for choosing me as the winner of the the Jane Phillips Award.
Digital Residence for Art and Design Foundation at UWTSD Swansea.
It’s a massive honour. I am grateful and really excited for what comes next.

Embracing our worst self in full understanding that we are not only that but our best self too.

The foundation course I have just finished has supported me thru this journey.
Given me the confidence to believe in myself as an artist and renewed a desire within me for education and learning.

The knuckle dusters that won me this opportunity are made from wood and wool (crochet) with crystals.
Exhibited in my end of year show.
…Desire.

This residency is giving me time to develop and progress these designs. Experiment with materials and process.
I have been back to the wood lab in uni and picked up my crochet hook. I already feel a move from the outward powerful statement of the knuckle dusters to a more inward feeling.
I am in a no mans land now. Finished one course and yet to start the next. It is exciting and daunting at the same time. A natural time for self reflection.
The new work I have been making looks inward to Fight ME.
We enter into new stages / relationships / phases in our lives all the time. When it’s something we want, have even sought out and fought for, we are happy and give of ourselves willingly to it. Wholeheartedly blending ourselves with who or what this new situation is.

I have been exploring the part of these situations when I have realised that I am no longer who I was.
Sometimes I have been ok with that. Even more, I have seen that the new me has grown and I am proud of who I have become. Being back in education has brought out the best parts of me. I have fought the lazy, contented Me to bring out the Want More Me.
But other times I have lost so much of myself in situations that I hardly recognise Me and had to fight to get Me back.

It’s the moment that you realise how much you have changed and have to decide how you feel about it that I have been focusing on. Is it good for me? Do I want this? Do I like who I am now? Do I feel trapped? Am I bound to this situation?

“Build up resilience, build up views

But you can’t build for long on a partial truth.”