It all started with my grandma who was a traveller and a collector. I would spend many hours of my childhood looking through her tins of trinkets, postcards with exotic stamps, tapestries and dolls from foreign lands. I was always more fascinated by the yellowing newspaper wrapping a doll, than by the doll itself. This was the beginning of my fascination with papers.
At art college I was immediately drawn to the dense flat colours of silkscreen printing and I found my place in the printmaking department. It was in Paris, on a travel scholarship, that I saw Matisse’s cut-outs for the first time. It wasn’t just the scale of his work but the intensity, the pin holes, crease lines and tom edges that fired my imagination. After leaving college I travelled for many years, always
