My Life So Far

I trained to be a schoolteacher in the late 1960s and after a few years teaching in London and Devon became a farmer’s wife in Northumberland.  With two sons now born I ran a farm playgroup for eight years and studied and taught yoga.

Following a search for the right school for my sons, I came across Rudolf Steiner Education and Anthroposophy in Edinburgh.  Having re-trained as a Steiner Teacher we moved to the West Midlands where I taught for six years.

I was drawn more and more towards therapeutic work and went on to study art therapy in Gloucestershire for four years.  After six months practical in Estonia at a school for children with severe learning disabilities, I took up work in Bristol; at a residential Camphill Community for adults with Mental Health problems and at an NHS family surgery. In 2003, I was accepted onto the Health Professions Council after submitting a paper.

I worked for ten years in the South West and alongside the one to one client work evolved a programme of art workshops for Self Development and Well-Being, using the rhythms of Nature and the Seasons, Art through the Ages and Myths and Legends of the world.

This work has taken me to Italy, Japan, Peru and back to Estonia. In 2008 I moved back to the North-East and began to bring all the strands of my life’s passions together into my own studio and local workshops.

I am working with the earth and hope to bring biodynamic practice into my garden. I have a book waiting to be taken off the back-burner which will be a guide for others to follow an artistic path of self-discovery.

Still learning of course, I feel it is important not to put dividers between poetry and science; between painting and dreamwork; between nature and culture in our search for a fulfilled life.