After a slightly delayed start to the new year, I am finally back in the taxidermy studio!
Either side of Christmas, on two separate occasions, I picked up this blasted cold/flu thing that was floating about, in what I’m calling a festive ‘flu sandwich! ‘ which definitely impacted my motivation for new years plans. In the midst of the mountain of tissues, interweb goblins totally corrupted my website and I have spent the last month leasing with tech guru’s getting that back up to a functioning state…but, now that’s all sorted, I am finally thinking about starting 2026 for real and getting some projects underway!
Let me tell you about them;
Firstly, I am honouring all of my existing commissions that I have agreed to, and will primarily be working on client projects for the next month or two. After that, I am starting a journey that has been a very long time coming.
As someone that is terrible at saying ‘no’ to people, I have tried and failed too many times to start this creative endeavour, because I keep letting ‘just one more commission’ in to my books. Before I know it, I’m fully booked for the year ahead and pressure to finish client work overwhelms me and overrides any personal plans that I once had.
This plan does not come without risk, but it’s something that’s so visceral within me and continually denying it is literally making me feel ill. I feel that it’s finally my time to start saying ‘YES’ to myself, allow myself the space to create freely in what I will call ‘M-art-ernity leave’ – a chance to birth my gifts to the world!
…to create freely in what I will call ‘M-art-ernity leave’ – a chance to birth my gifts to the world!
I cannot say too much at this stage, but the theme of my work has, and always will be, a reverence for wildlife and nature and this will remain very prominent in my future collections. For a long time now, I have been very inspired by the Christian iconography art of the Byzantine era and I have so many ideas that I am itching to create! I believe that nature is not something that should be viewed as separate from us, and is something to be worshipped.
I’m also very excited to loose myself in to my traditional oil paintings again, and may even experiment with a merge between the two disciplines.