Notes on a Changing Practice
‘Allotment Garden Soundscape, Blended, Remixed and Distorted’
Graphite on Wallpaper Lining Paper
70cms diameter
National Justice Museum, Nottingham
2023
Creative practices rarely move in a straight line. This is an exploration of what happens when an artist goes dormant, and the mind finds an unexpected way back.
Chapter One: The Dripping Tap
August 5th, 2025
Sometimes life becomes life-ish, and you have to go with its flow. That flow might mean a plug has stopped your creativity in its tracks. The plug, pressed tightly into the sink, stays there for eighteen months.
But the tap is dripping—a few drips a minute. Droplets of water slowly form at the rim of the tap and splish down into a pool, which incrementally rises week by week, edging ever closer to the rim.
I haven’t mathematically calculated the ratio of drops per minute, or how long it takes to fill an x-sized sink in an x amount of time, but I’m sure any mathematicians among you could devise a formula. (Though I digress – is it size of droplet × rate of flow/size of sink?)
You aren’t immediately aware this is happening. It’s a sink dwelling in your mind, standing behind a temporarily fused neural pathway. Neurons can blow a fuse in our wiring systems: some wires die, some lie dormant, and others grow and expand.
For me, that neural pathway was visual art. Life events hindered its ability to function, and even my desire to create. But I would be lying if I said no creativity was happening at all. An artist friend once told me, “You are still an artist, even when you’re making music instead.” I’ve said the same to myself while working on the allotment: I am still an artist when crafting compost forms or clearing and sculpting brambles.
The allotment is a continuous activity, mojo or not. Meanwhile, music-making, which had lain frustratingly dormant for years, has recently asserted itself through a will of its own. It made clear that my energies (during my allotted time of 1–3 pm three Sundays a month) were to be spent creating sounds through singing, keyboard, and, alongside a musical partner, guitar.
This has become a genuine pursuit, and one I fully intend to continue; for there is so much to explore, both musically and visually, through art-led videos. Here comes the connection: to make music, you make sounds. Tuneful or not, they are sounds all the same.
A few years ago, I created works in response to music I felt emotionally connected to. At some point along the way, I shifted from a performative, resource-sapping, and narrow mode of expressing those emotional connections through drawing with an almost Zen-like approach, capturing the sounds of everyday life happening within a place. The sounds that tell its story.