My practice bigins with the sea.

The ocean is home to organisms with forms and ways of living that can exceed the imagination. I am drawn to the sense of wonder I feel when I learn about these forms of life and the relationships between them. Through hand embroidery, I explore relationships between marine organisms and their environments, and more recently, connections between forms of life across different periods of time.

One of the starting points for this interest was my encounter with Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations of natural history. The strange and beautiful marine organisms he depicted brought back the kind of excitement I had felt toward fantasy as a child. Yet through natural history and biology, I came to realise that forms and behaviours that seem almost imaginary actually exist in the real world.

In Sea in My Palm, I focus on relationships taking place in the ocean today, including camouflage, symbiosis, predation and reproduction. By placing these scenes inside small shells, I bring usually overlooked moments of marine life into an intimate space that invites the viewer to look closely.

In Stitching Time & Sea, I bring together forms of life that belong to the same place but existed in different periods of time. Present-day plants are placed alongside ancient marine organisms that once lived in the same location, allowing forms of life that could never normally be seen together to meet within a single image. Rather than depicting ancient organisms as fossils, I reconstruct them as living presences, drawing on natural history sources while using imagination where knowledge is incomplete. I am interested in how, when looking at a landscape in the present, we might also imagine the lives and environments that once existed there.

For me, hand embroidery is a way of giving my subjects a sense of life and physical presence. Loose stitches, slight irregularities and the thickness of the embroidered surface help the depicted organisms feel not simply like images, but like things that exist within the space. By layering translucent fabrics, I also create depth and shifts in visual emphasis, allowing organisms to recede into or emerge from their surroundings while evoking the light and spatial qualities of an underwater environment.

Through my work, I want to give others a way to rediscover the wonder and beauty I encounter in the world. I want to share the sense that reality still contains things stranger than fiction, with the power to provoke imagination.