I was born and live in Essex. I studied Fine Art at The University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art. Subsequently, I earned an MA in Art and Architecture at the University of East London. The bedrock of my work consists of designing and making sculptures from forged and fabricated steel commissioned by housing associations, local authorities and private clients for public spaces. These projects are developed through working with local people and focusing their identity into visual stories that reveal the uniqueness of their locality. Alongside these public commissions, and coming from my skill in engaging people in my projects, I have worked on projects with museums funded by NESTA (National Endowment for Science Technology & the Arts), the Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England and the Manchester Museum, developing ideas about communicating complicated, subtle narratives based on these institutions’ collections. I created a series of performance projects about exploration from this work, produced with Grizedale Arts, Hastings Museum and the Banff Centre in Canada. I have always made drawings alongside my sculptural practice. I have exhibited my drawings and paintings periodically, with Wagner & Partner, Berlin, in 2004 and Reinhessen Kunstverein, Mainz, 2006. In 2008, I was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize. In 2016, I was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Watercolour Prize and, in 2017, the Royal Watercolour Society Prize, which I won in 2018. Watercolours have become more central to my work. I have exhibited with Wayfarers Gallery and Theodore: Art in Brooklyn, New York in 2014 and Galerie dreiZehn in Berlin in 2016/17. My painting involves a quantum delving into the spirit world from which a host of spectral personages flood onto the page. Veils of beautiful colour coalesce and oscillate, spun from the lower world in which lurk truth and beauty. I bring a damp, ancient, magical psycho-folk wind to the page, the heady breath of the bosky mire. I muck around with faeries, sprites and spirits, embracing the pink, shiny, glittery, massive scary teeth and truly awesome power of death-wielding elementals. It’s not always lovely in the woods. I am committed to loving the local and developing a regional voice against the bland internationalism of contemporary art. I feel firmly rooted, partly from building my home and workplace here in Essex on my family’s blackcurrant farm. The process of building my home was the subject of a television programme - ‘Grand Designs’ shown in the UK in 2010. During that building process, Freddie Robins, a fellow artist, and my wife founded the Blackwater Polytechnic, which is dedicated to promoting quality in design and building and to promoting Essex artists. We curate shows here in Essex and internationally. The landmark exhibition ‘Between Things’ at the Minories Art Gallery in Colchester, curated with Kaavous Clayton, was a sophisticated blending of design, art and craft, exemplifying my unique approach to visual culture.