I’m a landscape painter living in Eskdalemuir, a remote valley in Dumfries and Galloway. My practice begins on foot. I walk the moorland, forestry tracks and riverbanks with a small kit of graphite, ink and a pocket sketchbook, noticing small details along the way. Back in the studio, working large on the floor, these observations distil into increasingly abstract forms: a block of forestry becomes a band of dark colour.
Understanding my own neurodivergence has deepened how I work. I notice detail and pattern intensely, but I struggle to finish things systematically, so I work quickly in water-based media, including ink, watercolour and earth pigments gathered from the valley, on several surfaces at the same time. Letting the material lead suits me. Landscape has become my way of making sense of things that are otherwise hard to articulate, a visual metaphor for the self and for recovery.
The valley is layered with thousands of years of human presence, from stone circles and hill forts to commercial plantations, and I respond to both those visible scars and the deeper spirit of the place. Recent work has extended this to water, exploring lochs, rivers and the sea as keepers of memory, offering and loss.
