After five years working in a tiny spare room, I’m building a garden art studio at the bottom of the garden. This post shares the first steps — preparing the ground and designing the space.

There are artists whose studios are separate — places you go to work, then leave behind. And then there are artists for whom home itself is the studio: a living, breathing site of making , thinking, gathering , and return. I have always been drawn to the latter. When I think of artists whose homes are inseparable from their work, I think of Rose Wylie, painting at a domestic scale that feels both monumental and intimate. Mark Hearld, whose home and studio overflow with patte

I have learned to recognise my creativity by how it moves. Not forward in a straight line, but in rhythms — waxing and waning, opening and closing, gathering and resting. Over time, those rhythms began to echo patterns much older than productivity or output: the moon’s cycle, the turning of the seasons, the rise and fall of my own energy and attention. The Wheel of the Year gave language to something I was already sensing. The sabbats and cross-quarter festivals became points

There comes a moment in a creative life when the work begins to feel different — not broken, not blocked, but quietly out of sync . You might notice it in small ways at first. Returning to familiar materials but feeling oddly distant from them. Seeking inspiration but finding that new ideas don’t quite land. Sensing a restlessness that isn’t solved by doing more. Nothing is obviously wrong. And yet something is asking to be listened to. This moment doesn’t always arrive with

There is a different way of thinking about creative work — not as a series of breakthroughs or reinventions, but as a conversation that unfolds slow. A conversation you return to, again and again, sometimes knowingly, sometimes without realising it at all. When I look back across my own practice, I don’t see neat chapters or dramatic pivots. I see threads. Questions that reappear. Materials I leave and then come back to. Ways of working that deepen rather than disappear. This