THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

[Studio portrait by Hannah Bodsworth]

In 2007 I loaded two panniers for my bicycle and got the train up to London from Cornwall. When I got to Paddington, I took the Regents Canal… out of the back of the Station and into Little Venice.

I was just starting out as an artist then, and I have a vivid memory of cycling through the sunshine, peeping into these little worlds behind windows, and being filled with a sense of wonder. London is a city of so many contrasts: Canals weaving behind A-roads and each little bridge popping up into another neighbourhood… Camden, Kings Cross, Angel, Shoreditch, Hackney. Soon enough, these places began to find their way into my work.

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Eighteen years after that trip, I found myself making another one. Loading up a Luton van with canvases, prints, tools, boxes of paint, and a greasy spoon cafe made out of papier mache - and driving the 150 miles from Sheffield down to London.

I was moving my studio from the city of steel, where it’s been for the past decade, to an old textile factory in Hackney. Home for me now is a canal boat on the River Lea. It’s strange how life turns out sometimes - and how the choices we make can be traced back across time, like roots in the ground.

It was a hard decision to let go of the studio in Sheffield. That space had been my home for nearly 10 years - and was the culmination of a dream which I’m very proud to have realised. To have a studio of that scale in the heart of the city allowed me the space to grow. Not just creatively, but as a person too. It’s all linked though, isn’t it?

The studio is such a sacred space for an artist. A home for creativity in which ideas bloom and projects come to life. Being an artist is an all-consuming business where the line between public and personal is hard to draw; and where the space between ‘work’ and ‘life’ is often blurry. This means that the last few months for me have been very destabilising. Not just the physical work of packing up a huge space, but the emotional work of letting go of what was - and trusting what is coming next.

Sheffield is where I spent much of my childhood (technically I was born in Chesterfield, but that’s splitting hairs!). Being back in my hometown these past few years has been unexpectedly revealing. It’s given me a new perspective on where the seeds of my work were first planted.

I’ve always carried a sense of being slightly on the outside, wherever I’ve lived. Even growing up, that feeling lingered. Despite the proximity, being born in Chesterfield—with parents from the South—made me feel a little different in a city that wears its Northern pride on its sleeve. Not different enough for it to be “cool,” just different enough to feel... not quite from here.

This difference was intensified by the fact that I left the family home much younger than my friends and had to shape an identity myself, living in a small flat above a shop and trying to work out who to be in the world.

Place and identity are closely linked, and that contrast only sharpened when I packed my bags again and moved to Cornwall. Suddenly, I was very obviously Northern. It was strange being seen through that lens—particularly when I’d grown up in a city known as much for its green spaces and fresh air as its steelworks. To feel reduced to a stereotype I’d never quite identified with was confusing.

Maybe that’s why London has always made sense to me. A city in constant motion, shaped by newcomers, defined by change. It’s a place where everyone belongs because nothing ever really stays the same. The skyline shifts daily— constantly criss-crossed with cranes, buildings rising and falling.

And for now, I am splitting my time between two Cities, because I still have good reason to be in Sheffield for a little while longer.

I still don’t know exactly where I’m heading, but I do know that I’ll be able to look back on this moment as the start of a new chapter. A new space and new inspiration. It’s slightly unsettling, but I’ve been here before…

Shoreditch, 2013 Photograph by George McKay

A GLIMPSE INTO THE ARTIST STUDIO

Owen Richards, friend and collaborator and one of my favourite photographers - who has also relocated to Sheffield from London where we first met. He has produced a lovely series of work over the years documenting artist’s studios, including some great ones of me from when I first moved into the space. You should check out his wonderful photography work here.