I grew up in rural Scotland in the 1960s and 70s.  A prolific child artist, I gave up art after a troubled adolescence and the bullying remarks of a sexist art teacher.  I focused on music and performance instead. Then,  in 2000, in need of a more reliable income and quite by chance,  a friend asked me to help him with the making and mending of domestic stained glass windows.

Over the years, I was saddened by the meaningless designs I was asked to reproduce at work.  I was fascinated instead by the extraordinary imagery and allegorical power of medieval stained glass.

Eventually, in 2014 I decided to focus exclusively on highly-detailed, personal work, often displayed in light boxes,  like glowing paintings.

I  discovered that storytelling through stained glass could be a way out of many years of artistic and emotional frustration.

I sandblast, paint, fire, engrave and layer hand blown glass and scraps of old glass. The meticulous slowness of the process allows me to access subconscious, dreamlike imagery and tell stories linking real-life, contemporary experiences with historical texts, characters and events.
 

I want my work to reach out to people, to seduce, provoke, challenge, amuse and inspire them, and most of all, I want to save stained glass from being reduced to a trivial craft and reinvent it as the great communicator it once was.