Making work from memory and displacement

I am a painter based in Edinburgh, Scotland working across painting, collage, video and installation. Inspiration happens throughout the creative process. Like many artists, I am drawn to colour, found objects, memory and both real and imagined places. I don’t wait for inspiration; it is through making work that ideas and connections emerge.

In 1990 I moved from the USA to Scotland, an experience that continues to shape my work. I often describe painting as a way of restructuring what I see and remember. By bringing together different materials, images and fragments of experience, I try to create work that moves between personal memory and collective history.

From Brooklyn to rural Scotland

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio before living in Vermont, Philadelphia, California and New York City, where I met my Scottish husband. In 1990 we left Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a sheep farm in rural Angus.

The contrast could not have been greater. I went from East Village bars to Women’s Institute coffee mornings. The farm cottage we rented was freezing, heated by a coal fire with an electricity meter that took coins. At first the move felt like an adventure, but over time I became aware of the deeper displacement involved in leaving one country and building a life in another.

In pre-internet 1990, migration involved a genuine rupture with the past. Letters took weeks to arrive, phone calls were rare and expensive, and flights home happened perhaps once a year. That distance created both freedom and loss. The experience continues to inform how I think about place, memory and belonging.

The story of objects

For many people who migrate, ideas of identity and home become unstable. Objects begin to carry emotional weight, acting as reminders of people, places and former lives.

In the studio, found objects and images become material to think with. Narratives, memories and visual fragments overlap through painting, collage and installation. I am interested in the tension between nostalgia and transformation — how memory can both preserve and distort experience.

In 2023 the last belongings I had left in America arrived in Scotland by container ship after my mother sold the family home. Books, photographs, letters and drawings that had sat untouched for more than thirty years suddenly re-entered my life. Opening the boxes felt strangely disorientating, as if time had collapsed in on itself.

For the first time in decades, home existed in only one place.

Casser Maison

The arrival of these objects led me back to an earlier project inspired by the French-Canadian phrase Casser Maison — literally “breaking the house” — a term associated with clearing a home at the end of a life.

I became fascinated by the emotional complexity of dismantling a home: deciding what is kept, what is discarded and what stories objects continue to carry forward. These ideas continue to shape my work, particularly recent paintings and installations exploring memory, displacement and the traces people leave behind.

In the end, objects are never just objects. They absorb history, longing and imagination. The story of objects is also the story of ourselves.