Being self employed - The best thing about being self employed is the complete lack of a "typical" day! It's also perhaps one of the biggest challenges to manage your tasks so that everything is completed, whether it's a desirable job or not. I try to get to the studio, which is about 20mins drive from my home, every day, even if it's just for a few hours of actual making, as any artist in business should tell you that more than half of your time is made up with administration tasks. Once at the studio, the range of items I produce varies to the extent that I could be doing anything from working on wax models for casting, to screen-printing sheets of glass with patterns and imagery ready to be fired and worked into jewellery. Sometimes, I even clean the place too!

Inspiration - I’m inspired by the intricate details of life and my work is essentially a representational comment on the world around me as well as a constant challenge to my technical abilities. There are very few glass disciplines I have not tried and I’ve even mastered a couple of them too!

I mostly work with kiln-formed glass, which essentially requires much planning and preparing of the glass, whether that is with molds or applying enamels, prior to placing it in the kiln and programming it to heat and cool the glass in a certain way. It can sometimes take weeks to prepare a firing, only to have the resulting work fail due to some unexpected problem I didn’t foresee, but it is this troubleshooting element that I relish and keeps me engaged with the material.

Achievements - Still being in business is the biggest achievement and even that is never set in stone. As with any business producing luxury items, we are the first to suffer in a recession, but also, hopefully the first to be appreciated when people do look to spend their money again.