About

I live in West Devon, on the edge of Dartmoor with my family. Here I am planting trees, working in my studio, and chasing after a toddler.

My work is about place based natural colour making, and education. Since I became a mother, two years ago, I have taken a break from my personal creative practice and focussed on making plant based colour application processes for textiles and paper more accessible through online courses and events on this website as well as programming guest teachers on my learning platform plantsandcolour.com. Encouraging you to work with locally available plants to make vibrant and enduring colours for craft, art, and design practices.

Exploring and sharing how to make dyes, inks, and paints out of plants for drawing, painting, printing, and dyeing textiles and paper. Working with wild and cultivated plants to produce a variety of vibrant colours. Observing and learning from the plants that grow around us.

I work with artists and crafts people around the world who wish to transition their practice to working with locally available plants. Sharing recipes, and processes for exploring the possibilities of the plants that are accessible to grow or forage where you live. Making an online global community of botanical ink and paint makers, dyers, and printmakers, sharing stories of plant connection, colour explorations, and beautiful artwork created from handmade paints and inks. Creating learning communities is a very important part of my work, for sharing stories of our experiences with plants, bringing plant wisdom back into common knowledge again.

I came to this work after leaving the design industry through a desire to connect with the land through practical craft and growing. Working with plants such as camellia and buddleia flowers, oak galls, and dock roots, or growing dye plants in her garden such as madder, woad, and coreopsis. Creating drawings, paintings, and prints as one-off explorations of plant-based surface application bringing together natural dyeing, ink and paint making, and printmaking.

Growing up in the countryside in Gloucestershire, I was taught to paint and print by her mother as a child, who designs textiles for interiors; her work is all about colour and some how that has embedded itself in my psyche, so my work is all about colour too! Following a degree in product design at Glasgow School of Art, I sought to reconnect with my family roots in textiles and printmaking, as well as with the natural raw elements of where materials come from. I was drawn to Devon to study permaculture (Earth Activist Training), horticulture (Schumacher College), and wild plants (Ffyona Campbell & Rhizome), and stayed living here.

My interest in plants and fungi go beyond colour. I love to live and work in rhythm with the seasons, the foraging and growing food, dyes, and medicines.

To be wild is to know how to look after ourselves. To be in relationship with the plants growing around us intimately. There are no weeds, only medicines, foods, dye plants, and craft materials. 

About My Online Courses

After many years of practicing and teaching in person, I created these online courses to make the work more accessible. I brought my online teaching work together in to a year course that I run most years in order to offer an comprehensive learning experience for artists and makers interested in transitioning their practice to working with natural ingredients to try out a variety of approaches.

The 2024 group will be the fourth cohort of year course students.

Although this course is a few years old, it looks different this year, because I have re-organised and upgraded the resources to be more user friendly, with the new online member area to make it easier to access information and keep track of where you are in the course.

This course covers a large amount of content, I have has feedback that it can be a bit overwhelming! More than one person can do in a year unless you were to drop everything else in your life and focus on it full time. That is not really realistic! So I am currently working on making it more accessible.

The idea is that this year course is an introduction to many different approaches to colour making, and it will only be in the years afterwards that you will really delve deeply in to these practices. You will retain access to the resources and handbook beyond the year so you can continue to refer back.