My father was English and my mother was Australian – he was an academic at Sheffield University [in northern England] and she was a doctor. I was born in Sheffield and grew up in a large rambling house. It was a pretty academic set-up and I was expected to do well at school. My younger sister and I went to Sheffield High School, an all-girls school. There was an expectation that I would go into a sensible profession. My mother died when I was 12. I didn’t want to feel like the odd one out at school, I wanted life to go on as normal. Nowadays, a lot of children have split parentage, but at that time you were expected to have two parents and you were a bit the odd one out in class when your mother had died. The headmistress of the school later became my stepmother – my father married her when I was at university. Musical youth I was more musical than artistic as a child, and I still play the flute and sing in a choir. We had a piano at home, but my father didn’t encourage playing music, partly because his father had been a pianist and hadn’t focused on the family firm as he might have done, so it was fairly discouraged. My father liked painting, but painted in a very traditional way, he had a strong sense of right and wrong. I studied music to A-level, but didn’t do any art. I was interested in [French philosophers Albert] Camus and [Jean-Paul] Sartre, the philosophical angle, and went to Durham University to study theology. It was a strange thing to do at university because most students were doing it thinking of being ordained, and I wasn’t. I met Will – who would become my husband – at university. Break away After Durham, I went to do a law degree at Buckingham University. I graduated from there in 1988 and went to the Bar. While I was doing my pupillage in London, Will went to Yunnan to teach English with VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas). I decided to have a break and go out and see him. My father’s new wife, the headmistress, thought this was dreadful and my father had some sort of shock that I’d gone. Will and I travelled around China together and through Malaysia , and after about three months I came back, completed my pupillage and got a job as a lawyer in the government legal service. In 1990, when Will came back from China, he proposed. My stepmother was still so cross that I’d gone off in the middle of my pupillage that she said at our wedding she would disinherit me. I returned to China with Will; he was now working as a field officer with VSO based in Beijing. Beijing by bicycle We moved into a flat in the Friendship Hotel, on the edge of Beijing. It was a good time to be in Beijing because the city was developing fast and it had a good feel about it. It was life on a bicycle. I began working as a lawyer. It was the early era for the legal profession there, there were joint ventures building up. I also taught law at the Foreign Affairs College, Beijing University ( also called Peking University ) and a little at Renmin University. I learned Mandarin. I began learning Chinese ink painting with Liu Dawei, an amazing master who was teaching at the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Art. With art, you learn by imitation, particularly Chinese ink painting, you do things over and over again and throw most of it away. Being able to speak Mandarin meant it was relatively easy to travel around China and I drew as I travelled. I had joint exhibitions in Beijing of my ink painting and watercolours. Stanley camp I got pregnant in Beijing, so Will and I went back to London, which is where our sons were born, two years apart, in 1994 and 1996. While we were living in south London, Will announced that he was going to go into the priesthood. Goodbye house and car, and off we went to Cambridge, where he went to Westcott House theological college. In London, I’d started to do more art classes at Central Saint Martins and in Cambridge I did a degree in illustration at the Cambridge School of Art. We spent a couple of years in north Essex and then Will got a job out here in Hong Kong, as a chaplain at St John’s Cathedral and priest in charge at St Stephen’s Chapel. We arrived in 2004 and moved into Bungalow 5 at St Stephen’s College, in Stanley. It is a house with a history – it was used as part of an internment camp during the Japanese occupation and there were about 50 people living there at one point. Will’s predecessor had made an agreement with the college that he would revamp the place. He agreed to teach in the school, which Will has done, too, and I’ve taught a creative arts programme from time to time. Will’s predecessor reportedly exorcised any ghosts and I’ve not met any. Life inspired Our sons went to various schools but wound up at the Chinese International School. We couldn’t afford to go back to the UK all the time, so we took them to China. I would create a weird itinerary and off we’d go. We saw a lot of Guangxi, Guizhou , Hunan, Fujian and then Taiwan. My interest in China, the small communities and minorities, deepened. And back in Hong Kong, I was interested in the traditions and festivals. I’d go off and draw, sitting in the weirdest of positions in strange places. I had a great group of artist friends, we did life drawing together and called our group Life Inspired. We exhibited together and I had a solo exhibition in 2015 – collagraphs – collaged photographs, based on festivals in Hong Kong. I had three picture books published in Hong Kong – The Sand Turtle , The Mermaid and the Pink Dolphin and The Dragon’s Back . I was interested in the issue of biodiversity long before it became popular and went around the international schools with the books. In the bad books In 2016, when our sons were at university, I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, so I went back to the UK for a couple of years to do a master’s in children’s book illustration at the Cambridge School of Art. It was at this time that my stepmother, who was then in her 90s, turned against me furiously. My father had died, she thought his heart had been forever weakened since the time that I had disappeared to go off and see Will – dementia pulls the past into the present. It was a difficult couple of years, and I think my work lacked a lightness of being because of everything I was going through. Even though brush drawing had been my way of doing things, and is still the way I draw, I felt as though I couldn’t draw any more, so I started doing paper sculpture. When I came back to Hong Kong I had to deal with a lot of legal stuff, she had messed up my father’s will trust to some extent. Though it seems she had been sorry at the end, it was a great lesson in the meaning of forgiveness. And I forgave her at the end. Fitting the brief The advantage of having studied theology is that I can hold my own in a theological set-up and still do. I’ve always found the anthropology and psychology of religion interesting. Partly from travelling around Beijing and also from travelling around Hong Kong, I’m interested in folklore and the stories that bind communities. I’ve been building on the work I did during my master’s. During the programme, I was writing informational fiction and had an interest in the relationship between the extinct and the endangered and did a lot of drawing at the Natural History Museum (in London) and zoos. I love drawing wild animals with a brush. I call myself an illustrator-artist. Sometimes with fine art its quite conceptual in that you’re trying to get the audience to guess what the art is about, whereas the type of art I do is quite intentional. I’m a lawyer, I like a brief, I like to have a problem to solve. I’m lucky to have a studio – many a Hong Kong flat would fit in my studio. It’s a great space to work and I photograph my paper sculptures and stick them together digitally. I feel like I’m on a continual treadmill with people leaving. I’m quite sociable but I like to spend time also just working, so trying to find a balance between a social life and work, with people leaving, is hard.