My father was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy (RNVR) who gave his children a love of the sea from a very early age. I had family and godparents in Saltash and Falmouth, and we spent many happy times in Cornwall as we grew up.

I love being in, on, or by the water, especially the sea. I have a very wide taste in music, and my other interests are in dance, yoga and walking the coast paths. As a child I cannot remember a time when I was without a sketchbook.

We live in an old farmhouse about a mile inland from Marazion, and I work from my studio which is a renovated pigsty. I first discovered Barbara Hepworth when I saw her on Barnoon Hill in St Ives, loading a large sculpture onto an open truck outside the Palais de Danse in the 1960s. She has inspired me since that time, and still does; as that teenager, I did not know that so many years later I would be working in her home, garden and studio as a volunteer at Tate St Ives, at the Barbara Hepworth Museum.

My artistic background is in three-dimensional work, but my MA research study involved children’s emergent drawing. I became fascinated by the novel and often amazingly articulate symbols used by young children, revealing their knowledge and concepts through their drawings as they grow towards our culture. I developed a great respect for the capability to convey information and emotion with the minimum of symbols.

Working in the abstract for me is an intellectual problem-solving process; it facilitates intense description of aspects of reality which are inaccessible in representational art. It allows me to express what I know and feel, and it allows a freedom of imaginative response for the audience in the search for meaning.