“I am a painter: I produce ‘cut out, painted paper water colours’.
I kick myself that I have made my life so complicated!”

I'm a collage artist and I started making collages in 1968. My mother allowed me to attend art school aged 14, doing dressmaking, but I spent most of my time down the corridor in the life-drawing studio. Fast forward to 1968, I was in Cambridge Massachusetts having emigrated with my husband and young daughter. We were in an empty apartment; our worldly goods, two tea chests including my oil painting materials, were stranded on a quay in Boston, due to a dock strike.

My husband went to a DIY store for planks, we took bricks from the side walk (everybody did it) to make shelf stacks; I started to make decorative bowls and vases out of paper maché, using the funnies section of the New York Times. A combination of paper maché, American patchwork quilts (I had some Liberty lawn scraps in my hand luggage), applique hangings and banners, and Henri Matisse, moved me towards paper collages; I have never looked back.

My early pictures employed bold decorative papers, including foil among many others, but I now use almost exclusively, hand painted Ingres and cartridge paper, which I cut, apply and layer to my heart’s content.

I have been selected on a number of occasions for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition from the seventies to the nineties, and in 1983 won a RA special award for my work with paper. I have had a number of one man shows in Parsons Green and Bloomsbury and in 1995 I wrote a book on the art of paper collage commissioned by Search Press.

“I like the edges and incidentals of places, nothing manicured; showing signs of human activity – a line of figures on a rock, a man digging; a woman hanging out washing.”

I always use artists’ watercolours for painting my papers and permanent white gouache when I need an opaque colour. One of their qualities apart from being that of an elaborate watercolour is their texture and sense of depth coming from the build-up of papers.

My husband and I moved to Suffolk permanently in 1990, we had loved it since the 60s when as students we stayed in Lavenham, doing our courting in a white van parked in the market square, while listening to the Salvation Army Band trooping outside.

I am qualified if asked to carry out collage projects in primary schools. I give talks and demonstrations to art clubs which are enthusiastically received, and was a founder member of the ‘Artworks’ a group of 30 Suffolk Artists. I still have one man shows, among them exhibitions at the Chelsea Arts Club and the Glyndebourne Festival.

We live in a pink thatched cottage in Southolt, a tiny village in a remote part of North East Suffolk, 4 miles from the town of Eye where my son has based the architectural practice Gorniak & McKechnie for which my husband still works. Our ancient cottage, part of ‘the Lord’s waste’ overlooks fields; I have a long garden parallel to the road, which is a source of back ache but constant joy. Near the end my husband has built me a studio, which is introvert enough to enable me to concentrate on my work.