Artist’s Statement
My work constructs environments where girls are held, visible, and able to fully occupy space. My daughters, Lily and Mia, sit at the centre of this practice. Through painting, I place them within worlds that are deliberately shaped to support them—physically, emotionally, and without apology.
We live within systems historically shaped without girls and women at the centre. While that is shifting, the conditions are not yet equal. My practice responds by building alternative environments—not as fantasy, but as propositions. These are spaces where the terms have already changed, where presence, safety, and belonging are embedded from the outset.
The swimming pool becomes the central structure within this work. Bright, intentional, and protective, it is more than a backdrop—it is an environment designed to hold and contain. Open yet secure, it allows the figures to move freely. They play, argue, and connect. They are watched over, but not constrained. The architecture is active—it supports them.
This visual language is built on a tension between permanence and movement. The pool remains steady—architectural, calm, enduring—while the figures are all energy and momentum. The structure holds fleeting moments as they pass. The figures are rendered with realism and care because they exist. They are real, and they are complete as they are. In contrast, the environments shift toward abstraction—flattened colour, simplified space, stylised form. The world being painted does not fully exist, but within the work it is resolved—a constructed vision of what could be.
My connection to this work is personal. I grew up in a working-class family - my father was a boilermaker - where resilience and self-reliance were expected, and there was little margin for things not working out. I have six siblings, one sister and five brothers, and I learned early to make myself smaller as a girl—to be quieter, to temper myself, to make space for others to succeed. That understanding shaped how I saw myself and what I believed I was allowed to become. I have since spent more than three decades working within male-dominated environments, sharpening my awareness of how space is given, withheld, and negotiated—and informing my decision to construct environments where those conditions are no longer in question. When my husband and I built our pool, it was not about luxury—it was about creating a place of belonging for our daughters. A space where they could test boundaries, feel secure, and grow into themselves without that same contraction.
The swimming pool, long established as a site where architecture, identity, and leisure intersect, becomes here a site of care and construction. This work sits in dialogue with contemporary figurative painting that reclaims the female subject, but where much of that work confronts or exposes, my approach is to construct environments where that shift has already taken place.
In popular culture, the female voice has evolved rapidly, from passive to self-defined to collectively empowered. Visual art has been slower to follow. Where music has normalised the idea that women have a voice, visual art is still negotiating how women are seen. This work positions itself within that lag - offering an image of resolution rather than resistance.
These paintings do not ask for space for girls. They assume it.
