I am a Scottish artist, whose practice encompasses drawing, printmaking, stained glass, sculpture and film.

‘Sea States’ is a body of work which explores the sea as both a physical territory and a state of mind – the vastness of the ocean and movement of the tides being so often employed as metaphor for grief, loss, love and the depth of human feeling.

I have lived since childhood on the Clyde coast and this exploration is informed by my own particular relationship with the sea. Travelling between home and my Art School studio in the urban city centre, the sea exists always in my mind. The hum of the motorway merges with the roar of the waves, and becomes one. This difficulty of distance, and challenge of how I might describe the sea – particularly to those for whom the shore is a remote prospect – has come to define my work.

The titular paper works Sea States (I-IV) engage with the surf and tides as a drawing machine – the large sheets of paper shredded on the shoreline by the waves and repaired by hand the studio – laboriously pasted together with kurani paper and glue. These drawings are fixed neither in studio nor shoreline but operate expansively across both territories: some parts of the drawing repaired and preserved, whilst the missing pieces – those paper fragments lost to the tides – are invisible to the viewer but continue to exist, to dwell, elsewhere.

My work is often influenced by writing and poetry, and this year I have found myself returning again and again to the poetry of Emily Berry, and her collection ‘Stranger, Baby’. The melancholic atmosphere of the poet’s work spoke intimately to me, as I began to make work in a state of grief, following the death of my grandmother. My grandmother, a GSA graduate who studied stained glass was drawn repeatedly to capture the sea and its beauty.

Berry’s verse: ‘watching the sea is like watching something in pieces striving to be whole / imagine trying to pick a piece of the sea and show it to a person’ deeply resonated with my own endeavour, as I worked to capture the shifting patterns and colours of the sea’s surface through fragments of painted glass in Wave Compositions.

Words from Emily Berry’s poem ‘Picnic’, were borrowed as the title of the free-standing stained glass window And my eyes became the colour of the sea (A Window for Stow), which was built to echo the paned windows of the Stow Building. This window seeks to distill an experience of looking; to offer a ‘sea perspective’ within an urban landscape.