It’s only a few days now until I welcome you here at the Water Tower for the Northants and Rutland Open Studios and I’m so looking forward to it and excited for you to see the work that will be on show. You’ll be able to see my most recent pieces, including a large-scale installation in the field behind the studio, and also the work of interdisciplinary artist Warren Shaw. Warren and I have known each other for 15 years and he’s been assisting me at least one day a week in the studio for the past three. He’s an artist in his own right and an essential part of building and installing my own work and more.

We have a web of people that connect us, artists that I studied with or have worked with who taught Warren, and we first met through Andy Eathrone who taught Warren at Tresham College when I needed some help with a new website. It was only a couple of years after Warren had graduated but I could already see that he was interdisciplinary, interested in multiple art forms. Initially he helped me with my website and rescued me when I had problems with my computer, but around four years ago I recommended him to another artist, Gina Glover, who was looking for someone to help her in her studio and it made me think that I should ask him to work more regularly with me too.

Initially I actually found it very difficult because I find it very hard to have people coming into my space and being close to my work in progress, and I still don’t make art when he’s here. But he’s calm, caring, a real giver and a brilliant multi-tasker, and most importantly he’s relaxed, open and non-judgemental which makes him very easy to work with. Together we do technical things and problem solving – he’s just worked out how to install the big new sculpture in my field which has been a real challenge – and I bounce ideas off him. We’ve now started to talk to each other more about my work and for the first time we’ve dipped our toes into working as artists and friends; as well as exhibiting each of our work for Open Studios we’ll be doing an improvised performance with dancer and choreographer Eve McGlashan that Warren has created the sound for.

Having him here has made such a big difference to the work I’ve been able to create. I’m at my most comfortable making big works and the last time I did that was in 2000, when I created enormous sculptures for a solo show at Lyveden New Bield, a National Trust property. After that I was largely busy running my organisations, Fermynwoods contemporary Art and Deep Roots Tall Trees, and I’m only now getting back to a stage in my life where I want to be braver and more ambitious with my own work while I still can. Warren has been here just at the right moment to have really enabled me to make the experimental things I want to do a reality. I couldn’t do it without him.

WARREN: Working with Ros in her studios is fantastic, there is always some new idea bubbling away or interesting dyeing processes birthing new colours. I’ve helped her build supports for artwork, furniture for the studio, learnt to process flax and clean alpaca wool, photographed work and exhibitions, dug the earth to plant flax and observed how a sustainable practice works to name just a few. It’s a real privilege to work so closely with someone and help realise their creative ideas, you get to understand the creative path someone takes, join them on the journey and fix things along the way. There is an element of skill sharing between us and this brings new challenges that are often worked out together, such as the pegs I made from twigs for the flax calendar.

Ros kindly invited me to join her for Open Studios this year and I’m exhibiting some work alongside her and her studio. In my own artwork I’ve always loved taking a broad approach to the mediums that I work with; it is interdisciplinary and my practice often spans visual and audio work. I use a variety of mediums from drawing and painting to sound and sculpture, photography, and even video and printmaking. I’ve realised while making new works for this exhibition that there’s a duality to the things that I make, a balance between two different mediums, forces or ideas that’s part of the common thread that I’m starting to slowly understand. Doing so many different things means it can be challenging to find the what and the why through the whole journey.

My work is very experiential, verging on interactivity, an ‘open work’: I love the idea of making something which is only finished when someone experiences it, sees it or listens to it, something that I can’t experience in the way that you would. I grew up playing guitar and was gigging in a band for a while so that act of performance and working with sound has always resonated with me. I’ve been working with sound ever since college and one of the things that drew me to it was the fact that you can’t stop it or pin it down, it’s a constant movement or inertia, and an act of transformation that I find so interesting. There’s also a thread in my work with sound that quite often comes back to the bits of man-made technology that intrude or infiltrate your environment until you notice them, like the hum of your fridge that you get used to and don’t hear and then you go someone else’s house and immediately notice theirs.

Between working with Ros and Gina in their studios, as a Technician at Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, and a family business, Josef’s Pianos, I have limited time at the moment to make new work and the Open Studios exhibition has given me an outlet to create some new pieces: images that I’ve created using sheets of waste plastic impregnated with ink that have been left over from a printing process, that I’ve layered on a lightbox and re-photographed so that they make up a ghostly image in magenta, cyan, and yellow that looks like a memory of the original. They play on the relationship between digital and analogue processes, memory and presence, with some interesting links to the body and a human relationship to the forest. There will also be some previous works on display, including drawings, sound, paintings, and photos. The drawings are made by colouring in the individual squares of graph paper one by one, and some will have sound works with them too.

Sometimes things come full circle and, in a lot of ways, it might seem that the digital, sound and noise that I work with and think about are the opposite of Ros’ work with its natural materials and concerns around the environment and sustainability.  But I grew up in a very natural space, in a house that backed onto fields, and my parents are enthusiastic bird watchers so family holidays involved going out for walks and in the landscape and woods. I have a very strong affinity with natural things, which is probably why I can work well with the ideas that Ros has, and I think that there’s a lot of cross-over in the forms that I make. Some of those ghostly printed images, for example, look almost like embroidery, or roots, or veins and trees, and really speak to the wire work ‘Forced Containment’ that Ros has been creating, and there are a lot of elements of my work that draw on the natural form. My exploration of the relationship between digital and analogue elements, too, mirrors the man-made and natural ideas that are in some of Ros’ work, like the large installation of ‘Cage’ in the field. We are also collaborating on a performance with Eve McGlashan who will be performing with Ros’ sculpture and my sound on the last day of the exhibition.

I consider myself very lucky to be doing the work that I do, if I’m not making my own work, the next best thing is helping people make and display theirs. It’s an amazing job to have and I genuinely love it, with no day the same and new challenges always around the corner. There is a real fulfilment to helping others achieve their ideas and create something new and exciting and I’m very grateful for it.