Personal and Professional Background

I graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2010 and have since worked on various awesome projects with some great clients. I moved to Oslo in August 2010 to work for Hava Media as their resident designer and split my time between their office and my freelance illustrative work.

Illustration

I’m very interested in raw art, folky, decorative and sometimes creepy aspects to illustration. Most of my inspiration comes from old fables and art which leans more on the surreal side. I like to bring aspects of this into my work, especially in my personal projects where I can be as dark and surreal as I please!

Most of my projects start life in a sketchbook and then are transferred to the computer, where I work them up using my Wacom tablet and vectors. I love to escape for an afternoon to the Museum with some pencils and sketch the taxidermied animals. Animals are my favourite subject.

Design

Since leaving university and joining the team at Hava Media, I’ve been creating pretty and friendly designs for web projects of all sizes – from large news orientated websites through to user-interfaces for smartphone and tablet applications. Facing the challenge of working with content-heavy web properties, but having to come up with aesthetically pleasing, light-weight and welcoming results is both interesting and exciting to me.

Stitching

I’m also very interested in hand embroidery and machine stitching. It’s a very tactile and unique way of illustrating, giving a very personal and real result as you push the line in and out of the surface to create the drawing. I use embroidery to invert some of the stereotypes concerned with the craft movement, explore ideas surrounding femininity and to exploit some of my darker topics of illustration. Some of my embroidery pieces were included at my exhibition at the Coningsby Gallery in Soho, London.

What else?

When I was still at University I did some work with not for profit arts organisation- Nexus Art Cafe. This allowed me to step out of my usual boundaries and I engaged in teaching workshops, collaborative projects, exhibitions and learnt a lot about ethics and community in art.

Personal

I really love cycling around Oslo on my Pashley, will never pass up an opportunity to try a fancy cider or cup of tea and secretly love trashy TV shows and animated gifs of cats. I have many tattoos and my hair colour changes quite often. I really like music and often subject my boyfriend, office buddies and cat to my sometimes terrible music taste. When I was a little girl I ate a jelly air freshener, it didn’t taste good.

If you want to know more about me you can always check my blog, I update it pretty regularly.