Since graduating from Edinburgh College of Art with a Combined Studies Degree I have been a studio holder at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.I grew up in a farm working family. The rhythm of the days and seasons and patterns of life necessitating improvisations has influenced my work and my way of working.My work explores thresholds and systems both real and imagined. I draw on elements of memory, traces of human presence in a place trying to uncover different possibilities in the present from examining the past. I make installation structures and sculptures around these ideas. Their forms are a starting point for drawings of imagined natural or human systems where I speculate on the coexistence of nature and humanity, their thresholds and boundaries. I hope to give a sense of how we lived and live now. Recently this has taken the form of my Bondagers installation for the Whiteadder Valley Heart of the Lammermuirs Festival, Summer 2020. Before lockdown I worked with archaeologists and community groups in situ excavating sites in the Whiteadder Valley where we shared knowledge and insights into the walking the ground, uncovering and analysing its use and imaginative responses to this.Often the materials I use are natural and their beginnings are in nature. Examples are muslin, hessian, twine, bamboo, straw, recycled fabrics, linen thread. They are transformed by coiling, binding, twisting stitching, painting and drawing all with a view that these often fragile materials can be made into objects that have stability and strength. With these processes I produce sculpture often of enigmatic purpose, the hidden, forgotten or suggested areas of life.I place my work in a landscape or with architecture for example to record it but also to see the effect the surroundings have on the work. To see it’s transformation.Growing up with a mental health disability in a rural environment pervades my vision and work. Being unable to make a mark in a tied cottage and the silence of working people have influenced my working process and materials. I try to communicate through systems and thresholds my experience of mental illness in the contexts of philosophy and culture of a place and its people.