Born in Sutton Coldfield 1949, I am a freelance glass engraver and designer. I was taught point, drill and copper wheel engraving on glass by Peter Dreiser at Morley College, Lambeth from 1984-7 and continue to explore these techniques at my workshop in Clerkenwell.  My  work requires close collaboration with other artists who blow the glass for me to my design. I prefer to work on blown clear glass forms overlaid with coloured glass on the outer surface. Potter Morgan Glass, Carl Nordbruch and Sonja Klingler make work for me. I send them detailed drawings and try to attend the blowing; so often, slight alterations make all the difference when the glass is being formed. After annealing, the top surface of the glass is then cut away, ground and polished so that when the subsequent engravings on the outside surface are viewed, it is possible to see inside the piece, with all the refractions of the outside repeated on the inner surface, creating an illusion of one body floating inside another. Wheel engraving on glass does not need to be traditional in style or content. I use traditional techniques, engraving the glass surface with lathe-mounted copper, diamond and stone wheels, preferring the crispness and fine finish associated with these techniques. I have an old Spatzier lathe and use combinations of diamond and copper wheels, also flexible drive drill when the glass is too heavy to lift or too large to wield at the lathe. It takes a long time to engrave even a small piece of work. The Goldfishbowls illustrated took me more than two weeks' from start to finish (8am to 7pm Mon-Fri), including the cutting and polishing of the top surface. This piece has two overlay colours, ruby over yellow on top of clear lead crystal, which are cut away to give the different colour tones. When I am very busy and when the pieces are large, Steve Frey of Cold Glass Workshop in Frome, cuts and polishes the top surface of the thick pieces of glass for me. In this case, I mark up the glass for him in advance so that he knows precisely where the glass is to be cut.

Although no longer teaching at Morley College (1998-2005) , I still teach wheel engraving at workshops at UAC at Farnham and West Dean College in the UK, also at the Escuela Superior de la Fundación Centro Nacional del Vidrio at La Granja de San Ildefonso, Segovia in Spain in July 2007 and May 2009 and in July 2008 I led a workshop in glass engraving at the summer schools of BildWerk, Frauenau, Germany. The inspiration for my work ranges widely from natural history to the modern urban landscape. Recent work is inspired by the extraordinary flora and sea life of  South Australia which I visited in 2006 and formed the focus of my first solo show at The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh in June 2008 and my showcase at Contemporary Applied Arts in October 2008. I am currently preparing for a solo show in Paris at Galerie Poree in October 2009 and for the Scottish Gallery Co[]ect show at the Saatchi Galleries in London in May 2009. I was awarded an MBE for "Services to Glass Engraving" in the 2009 New Years Honours List.