“Just be you; everyone else is already taken.” Oscar Wilde
Paradoxically, just being ‘you’ is the hardest thing to be when you feel compelled to change the system.
For many, I am an artist; but my family and friends would tell you, I am simply a dreamer who could get lost in a glass of water.
From an very early age; my dreams were shaped by the intense colours, culture and geography of Italy, particularly Venice which was so close to our family home there. We had an Italian painter friend then, Eliot, who I apparently watched sitting from a step, for hours. I have never stopped drawing and making since.
Born in Taunton to an Italian father and French mother, we moved to South London, where I still live and where my practice is based. My path to art was through the sciences, working for ICI finally culminating with a Ph.D from UCL in 1996 on the Quantum behaviour of silicon. But I was also attending Goldsmiths College in the evening to study fine art. This cross fertilization of ideas has always been at the center of my practice and now has led me into the creation of art, that uses the innovations of the future with the practice of tradition to create a more sustainable present.
In addition to creating art, whilst raising my son Ciaran, I was so often asked about 'how I thought' that I then set up a consultancy delivering creative STEAM subjects to children and teachers. In 2006, I finished a BA in Fine Art and since then, I have shown extensively as well as taught and lectured at all levels including for companies such as Glaxo and The BBC. This is leading me onto exciting new collaborations with businesses such as Alsitek with their NOX absorbing geopolymer in which I have been pioneering new sculptures.Creativity and 'play' in any arena, really does strike me as a necessary evolution in an age of such scientific and technological possibilities. I believe that Artists and Art have an enormous responsibility in presenting a different perspective on the 21st Century Renaissance which is happening so very fast, especially now post-Covid.
Apart my passion for making connections and the dopamine highs that result, I love open space, speed, simplicity, paradox, trees, butterflies, mind minestrone, kindred minds who believe anything is possible, belly laughs and the sun on my back.
We really are just the sum of all the things we experience and the people we meet. This holds truer for artists than for most. I have been so fortunate in the people who have added to the sum of my parts. I cannot thank you enough.
'There is nothing in a caterpillar that ever suggests it will become a butterfly'. Buckminster Fuller