Held Together: The Campaign for Domestic Happiness
This artist book takes the form of a full-sized domestic apron, made from a deconstructed copy of The Campaign for Domestic Happiness by Isabella Beeton. The pages have been cut into squares and hand-stitched together using pink thread, referencing patchwork, repair and the feminised labour of sewing. A front pocket is incorporated into the structure, holding the book’s cover, inside which the single word “Aaaaaaaagh” replaces the original text.
By reworking a prescriptive domestic manual into an altered book-object, the piece brings text, material and form into direct dialogue. Hung from an oversized wooden spoon, the work sits between garment, tool and text. Around the hem, words such as wife, mother, housewife, cook and cleaner circle the body like prescribed roles. The familiar comfort associated with the apron is set against the uncomfortable misogyny embedded in the language, exposing how domestic ideals are sewn into everyday life and silently borne.
Steadfast Huginn
This work comprises red wooden circles assembled into a Viking-style shield, featuring a copper centre and white raven motifs. These elements evoke historical and cultural associations with strength, protection, and Vikings, while simultaneously functioning as sculptural and tactile components within the piece. When opened, the shield reveals a pop-up watercolor attic, inscribed with the Welsh phrase translating as “don’t put the violin in the attic.” This phrase operates as both conceptual and narrative content, encouraging perseverance and creative engagement.
The work exemplifies an integrated approach to materiality, structure, and meaning. The physical form of the shield intersects with the narrative content of the pop-up, creating a layered, site-specific object that situates storytelling within three-dimensional, interactive form. By combining traditional craft techniques, illustrative practice, and sculptural construction, the piece explores how material choice, form, and narrative can converge to produce affective, emotionally resonant outcomes.
As It Was Written
This artist book is made from a Bible that has been deconstructed and reassembled, disrupting its original order, structure and authority. Bookbinding glue laminating the pages proved powerful (requiring a band saw) echoing the strength believers find in the original content. By altering a text traditionally associated with instruction, belief and moral certainty, the work questions how meaning is constructed, preserved and imposed. Presented as an altered book-object, the piece invites slow looking and close reading, encouraging viewers to consider the relationship between text, material and power. Through acts of dismantling and differently reassembling, the work creates a space where the sacred is not erased but reconsidered.
Mapped: The Emotional Terrain of Motherhood
Mapped: The Emotional Terrain of Motherhood is an artist book in the form of a porcelain child’s head, mounted on a wooden base. Inspired by phrenology heads, the work references nineteenth-century attempts to categorise personality, behaviour, and potential by dividing the head into named zones. Historically used to explain character and justify social expectation, phrenology becomes here a framework for examining how motherhood is mentally and emotionally inscribed.
These words emerged intuitively, reflecting the emotional vocabulary that surrounds motherhood: tender, heavy, contradictory, and inescapable. They function as both hopes and burdens, accumulating across the form until the head becomes a site of expectation.
Although contemporary women have more reproductive choice than previous generations, the cultural pressure to become a mother persists. This work speaks to the invisible emotional labour attached to that expectation and the way it inhabits a woman’s inner life, regardless of her decision. Through material, text, and form, the piece acknowledges the power, complexity, and cost of choice, and honours women whose lives are shaped as much by refusal as by fulfilment.
The piece acknowledges motherhood as an embodied state of love, anxiety, and responsibility—an internal map shaped over time and carried largely unseen.
Lost
Lost is the first piece in a series about leaving York, with more details to follow.
Where in the World
Where in the World was created for a Zine fair in Vienna in 2026. I had wanted to experiment with black text laser printed onto black paper for a while and this provided an accessible excuse. I hope to add green on green, red on red and blue on blue at a later date.
Untitled (Suminagashi Book)
This artist book is an exploration of suminagashi, the Japanese technique of paper marbling, used here to produce a sequence of unique pages. Each sheet of cartridge paper has been individually dyed by hand, creating subtle variations in tone and pattern across a restrained palette of turquoise. The pages are bound using a Coptic stitch and enclosed within covers of yellow mulberry paper, allowing the book to open fully and emphasising the material qualities of the work.
Unusually within my practice, this piece does not follow a narrative structure. Instead, it is a sustained engagement with process, repetition and skill, where time, attention and labour are central. The book can be approached as a journal, a sculptural object, or as a record of making, with meaning shaped by the viewer’s own encounter with the object.