My House, My Canvas

When we moved to Margate, I hated it. It was the winter of 2015 and I had a tiny baby. I was alone a lot of the time, in a house that was extremely outdated and dilapidated. I didn't have a vision of what the house would become - I was in the baby fog of survival and identity crisis.

A few months in, we made some decisions: taking down walls in the hallway and between the two reception rooms. It opened up a huge living space and brought incredible light into the house.

Then twins followed very quickly, and suddenly I was at home with three children under two, going quietly mad with the monotony of nappies, feeding, nap times, and trying to stay sane.

During this time I began to find creativity wherever I could.

I tie-dyed baby clothes, made moulds of our body parts, decorated the babies bedroom with bells and wall hangings I'd collected since my teens. I am a magpie, - I collect things, little trinkets and decorative objects that find their way into every nook and cranny of the houses I've lived in. It's something I picked up from my mum, from growing up in her 18th-century country cottage in West Kent, empty beams and ancient spaces.

When I stopped breastfeeding, around 2019, I began doing clay work at Clayspace, once a week if I could manage it. I would spend an evening quite literally pottering. It was my head space - somewhere I could think, or not think, use my hands, be me rather than mum. Somewhere out of the house, and a short-lived but real sense of relief.

Around this time my mum got seriously ill with cancer. She died eighteen months after her diagnosis, just before covid. The twins were two, and my eldest had only just started primary school before it closed. My world came crashing down.

During the lockdown I created an art room for us to paint and decorate in - a way of channelling my grief. It was so hard. It felt like everyone I knew was drinking G&T in sunny gardens while I sat at home trying to make sense of all this death, of lives ending. My mum was only 54. Hearing the covid death toll climb, I felt an overwhelming sense of how fragile and short life really is.

Once restrictions eased, we started renovating the kitchen. We hadn't intended to do so much work, but once the house was being torn apart, it made sense to commit to the rest of it - and it ended up being most of the house. The kitchen faces north and extends into the back garden, an ideal spot for the big roof lights we installed, without the space overheating. We also added a utility room and a small shower room.

Directly above sat the main bathroom - an inconvenient one. It was the only toilet in the house, and to reach it you had to walk through a main bedroom, which was awkward for guests and for anyone using that room to sleep in. Because of the building work, we converted the small front bedroom into a shower room with a basin and toilet. There's no drainage at the front of the house, so we had to pump waste out - a good short-term fix, but pumps are noisy, and it wasn't ideal as our only bathroom.

The lower ground floor had always felt like a dead space: entirely open, with a central fireplace holding up most of the house, tiled floors, frosted windows. It wasn't damp exactly, but it had a cold, unused feeling. During the renovation we ran a temporary kitchen down there - everything pumped back uphill - useful, but temporary. Once the new kitchen was finished, we converted downstairs into a corridor and two rooms: the south-facing front room, full of light, became my studio, and the back room, home to the woodburner that used to sit in our kitchen, became a cosy spare bedroom.

During the renovation I decided I would make the tiles for the new kitchen myself. Having never made a tile before, it made perfect sense to try. (!)

I didnt stop at the kitchen tiles, I made every tile in the house on a rickety old kitchen table, cutting them by hand, stacking them against radiators to dry, carting them around in the boot of my car in search of kilns. I made tiles for the kitchen, the utility room, the downstairs shower room, the main bathroom, and the master en-suite.

The house became my canvas.

I worked with a local artist, Rory Strudwick, to paint a mural on the side of the house. I made the mermaid tail on the back wall and painted it a beautiful, rich blue, using paint from Francesca's Paint - a wonderful woman who handmakes all her paint in her studio in south London. Our builder, Kelvin Joy, was endlessly patient. I don't think he ever fully understood my vision, but he trusted it anyway, often against his better judgement I'm sure. Looking back, I was a little mad - motherhood, grief and renovation all at once will do that to a person.

In the summer of 2022, shortly after the renovation finished, my cousin drowned in a river. He was 23. The grief was enormous - losing someone so young, so suddenly, only deepened everything I already felt about the urgency of life and how to live it.

My marriage began to break down around the same time. My ex-husband worked away often, and undiagnosed ADHD, layered on top of everything else, became too much to carry. I realised I was unhappy - that if I died tomorrow, I'd feel I had wasted my time, and if I lived to be an old woman still in that marriage, it would be an even greater waste of who I was. I wasn't able to be myself. I wasn't able to create.

It was around this time I met Tracey. I showed her one of my kitchen tiles - a piece recreating 'Everyone I've Ever Slept With', one of several tiles I'd made as homage to women artists. She asked if I was an artist; I laughed and said I just made things at home. She was warm and unassuming, and said it looked to her like I was an artist all the same. We got talking, and she came round for a cup of tea. After that she'd knock on the window of my home studio and wave, and we became friendly.

She asked if I'd be interested in a studio at a building she'd recently taken on. I went to look, half-feeling like I was just humouring her - I never imagined I'd end up with a studio in a building belonging to Tracey Emin. She handpicked my space and told me it would be good for me to have a place of my own, somewhere to close the door on family life. It has been one of the most powerful things anyone has done for my creative journey. It really is a place I can go, shut the door, and let myself go.

Divorcing my ex-husband was acrimonious, and the future of the house was in question until 2025. I had to build a career from scratch - I didnt have a choice. All through the divorce I was reluctant to do anything to the house or garden, never sure whether I'd get to stay. I fought for it with everything I had to buy my ex-husband out, eventually piecing together a mortgage - begging, borrowing, and stretching every resource I had.

Once that was confirmed, I felt free. It was like a red rag to a bull for my creativity at home. I'd been planning a project called In Her Steps for a while - an extension of Turner's Female Contemporaries, an installation I'd made for Liminal Gallery; but it stayed research-based until 2025, when I started making the tiles, I made them with scraps of clay from paid jobs, making them as and when I could, and then in 2026, once my mortgage came through, I went for it. Everything about the house is still a work in progress. I rent the downstairs to a lodger, currently it's a wonderful artist called Esme Keanleyside, she has just finished her 18 month residency as part of Tracey's TEAR program, before she moved in I had Lola Stong-Brett, an amazing artist now represented by James Fuentes and Carl Freedman who finished the TEAR Residency in 2024. The house is full of strong women.

I've built a home that, for me, is about joy, play and expression. It's colourful, warm, charming, handmade with love and pride. In 2023 I made my kitchen table for a solo exhibition at TKE, ABC of Me was a full exploration of grief and loss and love, I used my mum's ashes in the glaze of the tiles - eventually bringing her into the house with me and my children. In the end, I want this house, and everything around it, to be a celebration of girlhood and womanhood, and of being free to be exactly who we are.