ARCHIVE
Cut, Collapse, Collect: Salvaged Forms in Motion
First exhibited at Tangled Festival at The Great Tapestry of Scotland, Galashiels, in May 2026, and subsequently shown as part of the Heriot-Watt University School of Textiles & Design Postgraduate Degree Show in August 2026, Cut, Collapse, Collect: Salvaged Forms in Motion transforms discarded materials into dynamic three-dimensional forms through collage and laser cutting.
Created as part of a wider staff showcase at Heriot-Watt University School of Textiles & Design, the project reflects an individual exploration of sustainability, material reuse, and creative making. Inspired by Bernat Klein's vibrant and rhythmic colour studies, the work explores how waste can become a source of creativity.
Using reclaimed materials from internal waste streams, the project employs repetition, layering, and fragmentation to reimagine discarded resources as sculptural sketchbook constructions. Visitors are invited to take part through a playful, hands-on activity using process-generated offcuts to create their own buildable collages.
By turning waste into a tool for experimentation, collaboration, and discovery, the project highlights the potential of circular design and encourages new ways of thinking about sustainability, making, and creative reuse.
Cut Collapse Collect: Salvaged Forms in Motion Videos
These stop motion animation reimagine leftover offcuts from Cut, Collapse, Collect as evolving forms in motion, highlighting the value of circular design and demonstrating how discarded materials can inspire creativity, transformation, and discovery. To watch the animations with sound please follow one of these links (redirected to YouTube):
The Red Sketchbook
Some of the general drawings, collages and mixed-media images captured in the red sketchbook. Going strong since 2021.
Wedding Invitations
A portfolio of Wedding Invitations designed throughout the years for friends & family.
Murals and Paintings
It started with Eve's Mural which was created to remember my friend's first born daughter. As we crept into the 2020s, I was busy realising my sketches onto their nursery wall for their second daughter who was born later that year. (check out Eve's Greeting Cards for more pictures)
Then came Poppy's Castle, another mural for friends but this time for an older child but not yet a young adult. This one was painted during the hottest week of summer 2021. Turns out that paint reacts very different in the winter versus the summer. If you're ever wanting anyone to tell you the truth...ask an 8-year-old!
Next up is Matthew's Garden. Not a mural, as the parents wanted their child to choose their own mural when they're old enough. Instead, I created a painting in secret during the summer of 2022, using a canvas that I had 'stolen' from their home many years previously because in my opinion it was hideous (!), and repurposed into a reinterpretation of their beautiful garden, right down to the pigeons that like to get busy on the fence posts! It now sits proudly in their entrance hall and they seem quite taken by it.
By Christmas 2023, my friends with Eve's Mural had moved house and so I had another mural to paint on Joy's bedroom wall. By this point, their daughter was 3 years old and requested a magical fairy forest, which I completed just before Christmas Day.
This was shortly followed by Matthew becoming a big brother, and so I reimagined a canvas I found at work into Poppy's Field of Dreams, which I presented to them in summer 2024 and they hung on the opposite wall in their hallway to Matthew's Garden.
To finish out 2024, and to celebrate the second birthday of another friend's son, I created William's Whimsical World, another canvas featuring an array of quirky animals from around the globe.
In 2025, I created Hedgerows for a friend who had commented that she liked the hedgerow in Poppy's Field of Dreams and so did I! I then painted Primrose's Country Cottage as a moving house gift for a work friend and her family. Then to keep boredom at bay during the summer, I painted my local coffee shop, and gifted it to them as a Christmas present. Many a happy hour reading my book and drinking a chai latte in that place...always wanted a local coffee place.
Alphabet Collages
With time on my hands due to Pandemic Lockdown One, I created a series of alphabet collages to keep me entertained.
MSc (by Research)
"Interpreting Tradition in the Digital Age: Can the qualities of a 1930s to 1950s archival printed fabric be captured utilising digital technology?"
At the end of 2018, I finished four years of part-time study to complete a Masters in Textile Research. The research analysed and developed opportunities to retain traditional printed fabric features utilising digital technologies. This was a great opportunity to combine my passion for print and archives into an engaging research project. The outcome is a traditional printed textile qualities matrix, which highlights the different visual and tactile features of an archival fabric and attempts to reproduce these features onto a digitally printed fabric. The fabric and reinterpretation of the fabric featured in the gallery below was designed and printed by Donald Brothers in the 1950s. The fabric was chosen for its many qualities and was only used for research purposes by Heriot-Watt University Archive Service.
Pet Portraits
It started with a request to draw a dog for my sister...
