Meet Me in William Morris’s Garden

Q. The exhibition brings together work from several areas of your practice, including In the Sculpture Garden, Love Letters from Art History, glitter paintings and printmaking. What connects these different bodies of work for you?
A. What connects the different bodies of work is the way I use colour, composition and imagery to create a particular visual language. Although the subject matter and processes can vary, there’s a consistency in the way I simplify forms, use bold colour and play with the relationship between image, pattern and text.

There’s also a sense of playfulness that I think is important across everything I make. I like the work to be visually immediate and inviting, but with enough detail or reference to reward a closer look. So, while the individual bodies of work might look quite different, they all come from the same visual curiosity and way of looking at the world.

Q. Gardens and landscapes appear repeatedly throughout your work. What is it about the idea of the garden that continues to interest you as an artist?
A. I suppose a garden is a kind of confined landscape. It’s nature, but it has also been composed and arranged by someone, which makes it feel quite close to the idea of a painting.

I’ve always liked the idea of an artist’s garden — Monet’s garden, for example — or a sculpture garden where plants, architecture and artworks exist together. The garden becomes a kind of artwork in itself.

There’s also a lovely connection with Matisse. When he was making his cut-outs, he described the colourful forms surrounding him as a “little garden” that he could walk around. I love that idea: that an artist can construct their own little world from colour, shape and form. That is probably what I’m doing with my landscapes too. I’m not necessarily trying to recreate a particular place. I’m creating a world.

Q. Colour is such an important element of your work. How do you approach colour, and what role does it play in creating the imagined worlds within your paintings?
A. Colour is incredibly important to my work, but it’s also very closely tied to the medium I’m using and what I want that medium to do.

I work a lot with gouache, for example, and to get that opaque, flat, matt quality, colours have to be mixed in particular ways. You’re constantly thinking about how much white or black you need to add to a colour to stop it becoming transparent. So sometimes my colour choices actually come from the physical properties of the paint itself.

Generally, though, I use colour to create contrast. I’m not usually trying to create traditionally tonal or realistic objects. I want things to pop. Complementary colours often sit next to one another because they make each other vibrate.

I suppose I’ve created my own language of colour, but it isn’t particularly complicated. There are really six fundamental colours: the three primaries and the three secondary colours created by mixing them. The complementary colour is simply the primary that is left out of each secondary colour. Black and white then give the other colours space to breathe.

Those are the foundations, but after that I try not to overthink it. I let instinct take over.

Q. A strong thread running through your work is your relationship with art history. What draws you to referencing other artists and their work, and how do you approach these references without simply reproducing them?
A. I’m not interested in simply reproducing another artist’s work. The pieces that reference other artists are generally more like poems, love letters or little stories that happen to mention an artist.

The idea for Love Letters from Art History actually came from doodling in my sketchbook at a screen-printing studio in Bristol a few years ago. I was in a bad mood and looked at someone’s abstract work and thought, “You’re not Willem de Kooning.” Almost immediately afterwards I thought: actually, if I turned that thought into something positive, it could make an interesting artwork. That became the starting point for the series, and the other titles followed.

There’s something quite nice about referencing artists from the past. It gives you a little raft to cling to creatively, but it also gives the viewer an immediate way into the work. Someone might recognise the reference, or perhaps they’ll see the name of an artist they don’t know and be curious enough to look them up.

I also work in arts education, so I like that aspect of it. Art history can sometimes feel intimidating or overly academic, whereas I like the idea of sneaking it into something playful and accessible.

Q. The title of the exhibition, Meet Me in William Morris’s Garden, comes from an exclusive limited-edition print created especially for Images In Frames. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind the print and how William Morris and Walthamstow influenced the piece?
A. The print grew out of my Meet Me in Matisse’s Garden works. I loved the idea of creating a William Morris version specifically for Walthamstow, where Morris was born.

Walthamstow, like much of London, is busy, noisy and full of energy. It never really stops. I liked the idea of creating a little piece of wilderness within that environment — a garden existing inside a busy city.

Morris’s work is also interesting because so much of his imagery has become part of our visual culture. I wanted to find a way into that imagery that felt playful and distinctly mine, rather than simply making another William Morris-style print.

That led me back to Matisse and his cut-outs. I created the image as a collage, playing with different forms and compositions until I had something that worked. That process allowed me to simplify the intricate forms associated with Morris into bold, playful blocks of colour, which felt much closer to my own visual language.

Morris’s patterns can be incredibly detailed, so I was interested in doing almost the opposite: stripping things back and seeing how little information I needed to create something that still felt connected to that world.

Q. Your Love Letters from Art History series takes inspiration from artists and moments in art history. If you could step inside any artist’s world for a day, whose would it be and why?
A. There are far too many to choose from. Sitting beside one of David Hockney’s swimming pools on a hot summer’s day would be pretty hard to resist, particularly after the summer we’ve just had.

But I think spending an evening with Keith Haring in 1980s New York would be incredible. I’d love to see that world first-hand: the studios, the clubs, the music, the people and the incredible creative energy of the city at that time.

Although, ideally, I’d somehow do both. An afternoon by Hockney’s pool and then an evening in Haring’s New York sounds like a pretty perfect day.

Q. Looking across the work in this exhibition, what do you hope visitors take away from it?
A. Honestly, I’d like them to enjoy it. I don’t think every artwork needs to come with a complicated instruction manual.

If someone sees the work, enjoys the colour, connects with an idea, recognises an artist they love, discovers someone new, or simply walks away feeling a little happier, then I’m happy.

There are lots of ideas behind the work, but ultimately I want it to be enjoyable to look at. Art can be serious, but it can also be fun. I think there’s room for both.