A story

I was born in Glasgow to a family that was Scottish, English, Polish, and Welsh—with my Irish relatives just two generations away. I grew up in the southwest of England with a name that set me apart as both a little odd and very Welsh. The first was something I grew to nurture and appreciate. The second was not true and left me feeling that identity was a slippery thing. In the end, this was also something I grew to appreciate and to understand as important for my work.

Bristol, where I spent my childhood, is a city on the edge of a gorge—a channel cut through rock, at the bottom of which a muddy river snakes. Suspended across the Avon, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s handsome bridge was an escape to the woodland beyond. 

I remember Bristol as a city of panoramas and perspectives. A place of tree-lined avenues, rickety backstreets, and hills down which houses tumbled into the waters below. I remember hot air balloons drifting overhead, landing in our gardens, school grounds, and sometimes getting stuck in trees. I remember endless rain and sunlight breaking through the clouds. In many ways, Bristol is a lot like Bergen—the city in Norway where I now live. 

Many things have changed, and many remain the same. I see more rainbows now than I did then. I see mushrooms in the woods I couldn’t distinguish before. The weather and the skies here are more dramatic, more nuanced, and more unpredictable. The hills have expanded to mountains, and the gorge of my childhood has multiplied to fjords that confound my sense of direction wherever I go. 

Bristol and Bergen are a part of me. Like my family (real or fictional), they have shaped what I do and how I do it. They are places defined by water, by their steep contours, and by unpredictable weather. They share trading histories in which people from all walks of life have mingled over generations. But they are also pockets set apart from the rest of the country, in which language and traditions have evolved at their own pace. 

If it were possible somehow to map my approach to making art, maybe you would end with some kind of weird collage of these two cities combined.