The Scottish Lettercutters Association

I went to Weymouth Stone Masonry College in the 1990’s, followed by a 3 year apprenticeship with Richard Kindersley in London and have been carving letters ever since. I have a studio in London, but since the pandemic I have based myself in Glasgow where I now carry out most of my carving work. My work is mainly headstones and memorials, garden pieces and some carving directly onto buildings.

I’ve been making site specific and public artwork in a variety of media for more than 40 years and my work is visible in streets, schools, museums and other public settings. Text has been a part of my work for a long time and this has increased along with a focus on Sundials and what I call 'Sun Sculptures'.

After many years working with stone as both a stone carver and a letter cutter, a new idea came to me which would lead to me changing from what I knew to a new exciting challenge, working with an unknown material - wood. For me the beauty of working with wood is that it is a living organism. Each wood has its own unique scent and texture. Due to its fragile nature it needs to be treated with the utmost care and delicacy and the respect it so rightly deserves.

I have been carving letters in stone since 2000. My love of stone began as a child searching for fossils in the chalk downlands of West Sussex. A desire to carve letters into stone emerged from working as a drystone dyker. The commissions I most like to work on are pieces that will stand as indoor objects that become part of the daily lives of those who commission me.

My studio sits on the edge of a wood in rural Perthshire and am constantly inspired by the natural elements around me. Even after 30 years of stone carving I still love the inherent qualities of the stones I choose to work with – sandstone, limestone, slate & marble. The marks that my chisels make on the stone and the durability of these pieces fascinate me.

I graduated from the City & Guilds Architectural Stone Carving Course in 2015 with a Diploma in Stone Carving. Thanks to the Lettering Arts Trust’s Journeyman Scheme, I went on to train with the renowned lettering artist John Neilson.

I’ve worked with stone for almost five decades, from Drystone Dyking to restoration carving on Cathedrals. My vocation for the last thirty years has been making gravestones; work I find enormously fulfilling. All the Ragged Days was written and carved in Lockdown 2020 after finding damaged feathers on the beach and feeling how familiar they seemed to our human experience; needing care and gentleness. The Afterlife is a visual ‘joke’ about my growing sense that dying could very possibly be accompanied by a feeling of going Home.

I am a lettering artist working mainly in stone and wood. A former stone conservator, I began lettercutting in 2011 and went on to complete a Historic Environment Scotland Craft Fellowship and a Lettering Arts Trust apprenticeship. I now work to commission from my Midlothian studio, using traditional methods of drawing, carving and finishing to create all manner of beautiful lettered works.

I studied for 4 years at City of London Art School which has a long tradition of working with lettering. On moving up to Edinburgh in 1998, I set up my own design and production workshop initially working with glassware but moving increasingly into stone. I now divide my time working equally between the two.

After studying sculpture at Camberwell and Byam Shaw art schools in London, I specialized in letter design and inscriptional letter carving. I work in stone, wood, metals and other media and my interest is in the integration of text, material and form.

I am an artist, a qualified cathedral stone mason and a former student of the European Lettering Institute in Brugge. My sculptural background, my love of words and my belief in ‘truth to material’ has led me to pursue work with letters, language and inscriptional carving. Writing, drawing and carving by hand are the foremost elements of my creative life.