A recent commission saw me entering the wonderful world of squid.  This is a fascinating creature with great variety in form and pattern, and was an ideal subject for a combination of scraperboard and graphite pencil.  I love the textures of their tentacles with sticky suckers and the dappled patterns on their shimmering bodies, which pick up the light as they glide through the water using their delicate wings.  Ancient squid fossils, or ammonites, lived around the same time as the dinosaurs, and are, or were, a fascinating group of animals. I used graphite pencil to capture the rough stony surfaces of the fossils with their delicate spirals and concentric patterned ridges.  I am itching to use this technique to explore more undersea creatures; there are so many exciting potential subjects to be studied and translated into new artworks.

The Falklands has been experiencing one of the best summers, sunny and bright with the occasional totally calm day.  Gardens in Stanley are full of flowers and vegetable gardens full of nature’s bounty thanks to the sunshine.  The ‘Goose on the roof’ is a collection of Falkland silhouettes and a celebration of its summer colour.

To mark the occasion of the wedding of two friends at South Georgia, a wonderfully unique place to get married, a group of Falkland Islands’ crafters got together to create a felt wedding bouquet. It was an exciting project and we spent many enjoyable hours felting, beading and enjoying a glass or two of red wine to aid the collective creative process.  The result is a colourful bouquet of Falkland Islands’ wildflowers. The collection includes the delicate Almond Flower, the bright yellow Woolly Ragwort, the beautiful Pale Maiden (the national flower of the Falklands), shiny red berries of the Diddle-Dee bush, spiky rushes and soft ferns. All the flowers were handmade in felt and then beaded to give them sparkle and bring the floral arrangement to life. The Falkland artists involved in creating the bouquet were Kim (Sea Cliff Felts), Lana and Zhanna (Pale Maiden Felting), Elena, Marie-Julie, Greta and myself.