An Artist's Home

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 pattern, birds, books, and colour. Peter Blake, whose collections and curiosities form a visual language of their own. Lee Krasner, working within — and against — the constraints of domestic life. And Phyllida Barlow, whose work is deeply informed by the material intelligence of everyday making.

These are not pristine spaces.

They are inhabited ones.

Studios in Motion

My own studio life has never been fixed. It has moved and reshaped itself alongside the rest of my life — expanding, contracting, adapting.

In my twenties, I worked from a 400 sq ft warehouse studio in South London: raw, expansive, industrial. Later came a 200 sq ft studio — still separate, still purposeful, but already more contained. Then a summerhouse and log cabin in the garden.

Each iteration taught me something about how I work — and what I need in order to keep going.

Since moving to Suffolk in 2020, I’ve worked from the small spare bedroom in our home. It became my room of one’s own — a place of deep focus, intimacy, and return. That space even found its way onto the cover of In Her Studio, which felt like a quiet affirmation: that serious, committed work can be made in domestic, lived-in spaces.

But the work has continued to grow.

The ideas want more room.

The scale is shifting.

The walls simply aren’t big enough anymore.

This isn’t a rejection of that room — it has held me faithfully through an important chapter. But as I enter my fifth decade, I feel the need to expand once more. Not to separate making from living, but to give the work the physical space it is now asking for.

The Tension of Leaving

I have had the separate studio.

And alongside the space, there was always a quiet tension.

The getting there.

The commute.

The need to get dressed in a certain way to withstand the stark, cold space.

But more than that, there was the pressure of arrival.

Opening the door to a studio, carrying the unspoken expectation that I should make an artwork. That inspiration should be fully formed, intentional, worthy of the space I’d travelled to. That I should arrive ready.

For me — and I know for other artists I’ve mentored too — that expectation can be paralysing. Especially in shared studios, where the sense of being witnessed, even silently, can harden into self-consciousness. The studio becomes a stage rather than a site of play.

There was also the weight of time.

When you have other responsibilities — work, care, life — time arrives in fragments. Half an hour here. Twenty minutes there. But when my studio was rented, away from home, it felt as though anything less than a full day didn’t count. That I had to make a proper commitment to justify the journey, the rent, the leaving.

And so I waited.

For whole days.

For clear schedules.

For the right conditions.

Meanwhile, the work only needed thirty minutes. Thirty minutes with my materials. Thirty minutes to follow a thread, to respond to a spark, to let something begin.

At home, the process is different.

A piece of paper lies on top of a photograph in the corner of a table.

A juxtaposition appears.

An idea sparks.

The scissors are to hand.

The work begins.

There is no separation between noticing and making — only flow between the two.

As I’ve grown older, this immediacy has become more important. My head can feel so full of ideas it might burst — but if I don’t act when the spark appears, it can dissipate. Dilute. Slip away. Recovering it later can take real effort.

There was a falseness, for me, in opening the door of a rented studio and attempting to manufacture inspiration on demand. Creativity doesn’t always work like that — it arrives sideways, through accidents, through attention, through being present to what is already there.

My home is a constant source of inspiration.

The steam rising from my morning coffee.

My cats’ silhouettes against the window.

Sunlight breaking through the curtains, making patterns on the wall.

A vase of flowers shifting slowly as the days pass.

The objects are as important as the space itself — rooms full of vistas. Accidental still lives formed simply by living. There is a quality to them that speaks directly to my soul: a deep knowing that here is the spark, the glowing ember at the heart of my creativity.

When creativity lives at home, there is no threshold to cross, no permission to grant. I meet the work where I already am.

When the spark appears, I can answer it.

When inspiration struck — suddenly, insistently — there was friction. Creativity asked for immediacy, but the logistics asked for preparation. Momentum softened. Urgency dulled.

And then came the guilt.

The days I didn’t go.

The weeks that slipped past.

The sense that I should be making work, somewhere else.

When creativity lives at a distance, it can begin to feel like an appointment you’re failing to keep.

All of that falls away when creativity lives at home.

There is no threshold to cross, no permission to grant, no journey to complete. You meet the work where you already are — in the pause between tasks, in the quiet of early morning, in the half hour before supper.

For me, this isn’t about convenience.

It’s about responsiveness.

When the work calls, I can answer.

A Shared Creative Household

I share this home with my husband, also an artist. Between us are books stacked and restacked, images pinned and unpinned, objects gathered over years of living, collecting, and noticing. Our walls carry traces of thought. Our shelves are archives.

As we renovate the house this year, stripping out the artex, repairing the cracks, revealing the bones of the building, we are not chasing perfection, we are seeking soul. We are making space for spontaneity.

Collaging at the kitchen table.

Sewing in the sitting room.

Drawing in bed.

Letting creativity leak into the everyday — uncontained, unprecious, alive.

The garden studio we are building is not an escape from home, but an extension of it. It will overlook an ancient oak tree, home to what feels like a hundred crows — a place to work alongside the land, the seasons, and the weather, rather than apart from them.

Domestic Life as Creative Source

Phyllida Barlow once reflected on the influence of her childhood home:

From her home studio in London, Barlow recalls her childhood, where she witnessed her mother’s ad-hoc way of making clothing and toys for her children. Her mother treated the materials of everyday domestic life as resources with endless potential, an attitude that has affected Barlow’s artmaking.

— Art21 Contemporary Council

This resonates deeply.

My own mother was always making: doll’s clothes, my clothes, doll’s house furniture, curtains, cushions. Her sewing machine and sewing box were rarely put away. Materials moved fluidly between function and imagination.

Domestic life — its rhythms, repairs, and fragments — has always been at the heartwood of my creative enquiry.

During my Fine Art degree, Rachel Whiteread's House left a profound mark on me, alongside Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. Both affirmed something I already felt intuitively: that rooms, objects, corners, drawers, and thresholds carry memory, meaning, and psychic weight.

The Heartwood of the Work

The objects that surround us — collections of domestic things, fragments of handcraft, worn tools, textiles, paper, thread — all find their way into my work. Not as nostalgia, but as material intelligence. As evidence of lives lived attentively.

An Artist’s Home is not about aestheticising domesticity.

It is about recognising it as a site of knowledge.

This is a place where making and living are not separate acts, but part of the same long conversation.

And if you find yourself drawn to this way of working — slowly, relationally, from the inside out — you are very welcome here.

If you’d like to stay awhile, you can read more from inside the work in the journal — notes on studio life, cycles, and the long conversation between making and living.

→ Enter the Journal

(You may also like: When Your Creative Work Wants to Change)