For as long as I can remember, the drawings and paintings that I’ve wanted to make have been complex, and they’ve had compartments. At 4 or 5 years, asking my mum to scribble on a piece of paper so that I could colour the intersecting shapes in, until I realised I could make the scribble myself. A pre-teen, hiding away in our loft with its itchy insulation, drawing imagined villages with roads and houses on big pieces of paper. In A level art, our first foray into working with found materials saw me creating large spheres in willow with smaller spheres as compartments and bits of old car reflectors hung in the spaces.

You might almost say it was inevitable that the beach caves, rock pools, and seaside houses that surrounded me at art school in Cornwall would pale in comparison to brightly-coloured microscopy images I found in the biology textbooks in the library. This was where I made my first Cell Paintings (1999-2000), and it was the curiosity that came with wanting to understand the images more that led to jobs in biology and a career in Molecular Cell Biology after leaving art school.

Yet, the yearning to make more always pulls me back to painting my miniature worlds, inspired by life inside cells.