This past year was the year when I felt myself truly taking on the mantle of artist, and finding that the description fit. Something fundamental shifted for me in 2025. As I look back, what stays with me most is not a list of achievements, but a feeling — of movement, of being shaped by my work just as I have been shaping it.

It has been a year of deepening into wildlife, and especially birds; of saying yes to things that stretched me beyond what I thought I could do; and of learning to trust where the making might lead.

Today, the mountains are steaming - wisps of cotton drifting above and around the fell sides. It feels almost tropical. The light is subdued, the trees are dark, and the river has returned to its boundaries. Everything is hushed and still. We breathe it in. The quiet. A quiet that touches Nature and Humans. For this moment, it feels like time is suspended, and I feel space opening up within me as I let the silence in.

When I first realised that many people consider Nature to be something that we are not part of - there are humans and then there is this great wild thing we must work around that is called the natural world - I realised that I had never once considered myself to be separate from Nature.

Since then, I have come to see that there is something dangerous about this perspective: if we don't consider ourselves part of Nature then we are not invested in cherishing, tending and respecting Nature; instead, our focus is on taming and controlling it.

When I see a creature in its natural element, it is this elemental relationship that I want to capture. But how to do this?

How can we use a two-dimensional medium to express the alive essence of a wild (or semi-wild) being?