On a very crisp and beautiful January morning I visited the lovely Runswick Bay to help with the delivery and installation of a ‘seascape’ themed screen. With large sea-facing windows streaming light into a very special house overlooking the spectacular views of the east coast – I wanted the design to maximise all of this potential – and project an ever-changing story by using the cast shadows. Along with the seagulls and water ripples it features Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Sea And The Hills’ and this part of the design was eased by collaborating, once again, with typography whizz Adrian Riley from Electric Angel.

The screen which was commissioned as a dividing wall to an en-suite bathroom was fabricated using sandblasted and silvered glass by the Wiltshire outfit Proto Studios.

* Hoping to bring you more images of the screen once the house has been fully completed and the builder’s dust has settled.

Work has begun on a new commission to help revamp Giorgio Alessio’s award winning restaurant ‘La Lanterna‘ – described by the influential Italian daily newspaper La Stampa as ‘the English temple of Italian cuisine’. I have been in cahoots with the very talented theatre designer Jan Bee Brown, who has been assigned the task of interior design and our mission is to create a newly spruced home suitable for some of the most highly commended gastronomical cucina in the country.

As Giorgio is looking to blend a little of his native roots of Piedmont with his adopted town of Scarborough, we are currently exploring the possibilities of fusing the famous Piedmont ‘Mulberry’ tree and foggy landscapes with our very own east coast horizon lines as a possible backdrop to Giorgio’s signature dishes of Tartufi Bianchi (white truffles); Osso Buco; or Velvet crabs. With the refit due to be complete by the end of April, I hope to update you with more progress very soon.

What a rare treat it was to hang out at Scarborough’s Sea Swim hut on the south bay as part of their summer residency spots; and finally get round to doing some freeform drawing.

Funded by the innovative program Imove, Sea Swim believes that swimming can invigorate both the mind and the body – and collaborates with regional artists to explore the creatively liberating effects of being so close to the North Sea.

As part of my weekend in and around the beach hut I wanted to return to my studies on ‘horizon lines’, a personal drawing project which has been on hold for some time. I had fun running an experimental drawing workshop – Light and Line, but the real luxury was to reconnect with the constantly changing quality of light over the sea and to spend time on open ended research drawing. I produced initial sketches, which I intend to develop into a new body of work using black pigment and graphite. For the time being I envisage sticking with drawing, but who knows, maybe there’ll be some glass work too eventually.

One of the highlights of 2012 was being shortlisted for the Garfield Weston Foundation Canterbury Cathedral Competition run by the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust. Simply being considered for the role of creating a one-off designed window in Canterbury Cathedral, where many of the original windows are still going strong some 800 years after they were crafted, was a huge privilege. And with a trip to the UNESCO World Heritage Site the whole experience was a wonderful adventure.

My ideas for the design in the cloister centred around the daily lives of the Benedictine monastic community and their coming together to eat. I used contemporary photographic images of parsley, rosemary, chives and mint, layering them to suggest a ‘living garden’, as the cloisters area would once have been. By combining traditional lead work and contemporary photographic imagery I aimed to bridge the historical and present day.