In 2009 I received an Arts Council National Lottery Award, this enabled me to work with other artists and technicians to explore and experiment new media and techniques. As the project developed I began to work on more truly collaborative pieces with three core artists: Conrad Cookson, Paul Farago and Nick Caiden. The fact that we had all known each other and our work for some time (Conrad, Paul and I studied Fine Art together at Leeds Polytechnic, while I met Nick on a printmaking course a few years later) was hugely beneficial for the project and all the artists worked with me to reference and reinterpret my earlier work while using their particular skills to incorporate new ideas and perspectives creating an exciting new body of work. Many of these collaborative pieces were shown in my “Pretending to be a Mermaid and other stories” exhibition and some are shown here.

Surfacing (Digital imaging, wood and mixed media)

In’ Surfacing’ I worked with Conrad Cookson, we used my 2001 collograph and its painted plate of the same name (see Printmaking and Mixed Media Galleries) as the starting point for a small sculptural work, reminiscent of a roadside or household shrine. This piece owes much to my love of folk and naive art but this was combined with Conrad’s skilled and careful finishing to create a piece which is harder to categorise.