Bring nature forward.
Bring ritual forward.
Bring connection forward.
Human and non-human.
Body and the natural world.
Inner and outer.

Allow all this to exist at once.

Featured Projects

  • What we share / what we hold back

    Redacted embroidered text on a hospital gown evokes the private experience of a cancer patient’s partner and highlights cancer’s wider impact.

  • See me through this

    A long-term collaborative project with artist Maja Daniels that explores my experience with a breast cancer gene mutation through photography, writing and mixed media work.

  • A pandemic love affair

    Lumen prints made on photographic paper with plants & flowers collected in Hackney Marshes capture moments of beauty and respite during London’s Covid lockdown in 2020.

See More

Whispers from my creative practice…

I am here, Jill.

I am here. I am full. I am with you.

This is not about finding or connecting the threads – the tapestry is there, already woven.

It holds a story that stretches forward and backward in time. Contains a multitude of stories, of human and natural worlds, visible and unseen.

Your job is to move across the threads from one to another, collect the soil of experience on your shoes and travel with it, leave traces of it as you go.

Transform the tapestry into a sphere. Invite others along to have a journey of their own.

Don’t separate or categorise. Don’t limit. Find ways to celebrate and to honour.

Allow all things to exist together with mingling edges.

Bring nature forward. Bring ritual forward. Bring connection forward. Human and non-human. Body and the natural world. Inner and outer.

Allow all this to exist at once.

Be calm, drunk on the fermentation of life and experience. Dwell in the places you and the universe touch.

It’s not about what you think the world wants of you. Or what you think art or life or you should be.

Let us sit. Let us breathe. Let us move at the pace of trees.

This is the way to crack open your chest and spill yourself into the world.

Not suddenly or violently, but a slow trickle, like water pushing through a crack in a rock shelf fed by a glacier.

REFLECTIONS CONTENT
How much do you think a person is worth?

I wrote this text in response to a series of questions from artist Susan Aldworth’s project “The Value of a Human”. I struggled with the question “How much do you think a person is worth?” until, in one quick flow, this brief essay poured out.

Reflecting on an image

In preparing for an upcoming talk, I’ve been thinking a lot about this image. My mastectomy and reconstructive surgery was a just month away when I finally had my hospital “before” photos taken. I’d canceled twice…

Deleterious

Deleterious… My BRCA test results letter was my induction into the world of the “worried well”. I was not ill, but was suddenly living in the world of the infinitesimally small – my own DNA cast a shadow over everything I was and knew…

Seeing into the soul of a woodland

I live a short walk from the Hackney Marshes and the tiny Wick Woodland, and one of the beautiful, unpredicted results of being here under lockdown is that I have fallen in love with this vast green space near my house…

Imagining your death

I’ve been playing with images of my dad to learn a bit of Photoshop. He died in 2007, but not a day goes by that he is not in my thoughts. I don’t have a religious faith, but sometimes I still feel that he is still alive in some way...

Mantra for the dead

In 2017 on a residency in Italy, I made cyanotypes from star maps. Well, they made themselves really, I just provided the materials and helped them along. Right away I knew I wanted to do something large, so laid out a grid of 9 squares, sections of stars from across the sky…

Artist’s residency at THECUBE

I’ve been interested in how we process emotion: how it is situated within the body, how we recognize it in ourselves and others, and how that recognition can transform us…

Making Sense of Experience Through Story & Art

Published in THECUBE’s Zine A: Embodiment / 2017
“The subject of pain is the business I am in. To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering…”

CERN’s large hadron collider

I didn’t go to CERN with the idea that what I learned about physics would feed directly into the artwork I am doing focused on genetics and mutation—but I was open to finding connections…

See Me Through This in the FT

The phrase “POSITIVE FOR A DELETERIOUS MUTATION” still hung in the air as I clicked off the phone. All caps. The way I’d later see it written on the official test results…

Thoughts & Reflections

Please get in touch!

I’m available for talks, workshops, collaborations & consultations, or would love to connect over a cup of coffee.