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 of age, I remember asking my mum to scribble on a piece of paper so that I could colour in the intersecting shapes—that was until I realised I could make the scribbles myself. As a pre-teen, I have memories of hiding away in our loft with its itchy insulation, drawing imagined villages with roads and houses on big sheets of paper. In A-level art, our first venture into working with found materials saw me creating huge willow spheres with smaller spheres suspended within; bits of old car reflectors hung in the spaces.

At art school in Cornwall (UK), I made my first Cell Paintings (1999-2000), inspired by the brightly-coloured microscopy images I found in the biology textbooks in the library. I didn’t yet understand the images I was looking at, and it was this curiosity that led me to train as a Scientist after leaving art school.

The need to keep painting always pulls me back to my miniature worlds, inspired by life inside cells.