My art combines images from many different worlds. I love to connect the world of art with the world of nature. I also love the fact that great art and great science are very closely linked – and where they meet is both inspiring and surprising.

Nautilus Atelier is the name of my studio in county Wexford, Ireland, close to some of the things that inspire me most – the sea, the countryside, and the creatures that inhabit them both.

The name ‘Nautilus’ echoes my lifetime love of the sea and the uniqueness of the intriguing creatures that inhabit this vast unexplored underwater world. Nautilus Atelier is both a personal haven and a space that inspires and encourages my creativity and my imagination. It is also a physical manifestation of my transition to the life of the artist.

It is also a wonderful repository of all the images, curios and physical mementos from my life that I hold dear, and the stories that they tell so eloquently when captured on glass. The peace and sheer beauty of the Wexford countryside in the south-east of Ireland - and the nature filled beaches near my studio that stretch for miles - have allowed my creativity to flourish in ways that I couldn’t have imagined, and the fruits of this creativity is on permanent exhibition at Nautilus Atelier.

Nautilus Atelier is open by appointment, so if you would like to see any of my individual pieces or collections, please make an appointment by clicking here

While I love to write, visual communication speaks much more loudly to me now. Throughout my life, I have collected imagery as a way of staying connected with the things that move me, inspire me, thrill me, amuse me and spark my imagination.

My art draws on this lifetime collection of images, and I have chosen to curate them through the medium of decoupage, using glass as a blank canvass on which these images and their stories come to life again.

I have used glass as my preferred medium because of the diversity of shapes that it offers. Glass in different forms allows me to create images on both sides, while the four-sided reverse collage method of decoupage enables the creation of strikingly colourful backgrounds, with the images popping out proudly and boldly.

While I initially experimented with a number of different media – including furniture and mirrors - my love of art on glass was really brought to life by a master class with the highly talented and wonderful Jill Barnes Dacey in Berlin. She has been a wonderful teacher and mentor, and I owe her a great debt of gratitude.

As well as two-dimensional imagery, in some pieces I have also added shells and jewellery to the mix, to add a three-dimensional aspect that makes my art highly distinctive and unusual.

Every piece is a one-off – totally unique in inspiration and in the story that it tells. Each individual creation takes weeks to complete – and in some cases, the gestation period has run to years!

Choosing a theme, finding an exact image to represent that theme, selecting the ‘canvas’ that will best bring it to life, then lovingly applying the image to the medium are all labours of love. It’s the time spent on them, however, and the sense of ‘me’ in these long hours, that makes each individual piece so special when it finally emerges, completely reimagined on its new medium of glass.

The theme or the inspiration for my work can be anything from a special place, a remembered snippet of conversation with an old friend, a feeling, a passage in a book – or any of the hundreds of things that make a connection with my soul and with my sense of beauty.

Once I’m happy that an individual piece can satisfy my own very uncompromising standards, it is ready for treatment - 24 coats of varnish applied lovingly by hand, to make the background and imagery radiate and entrance in a way that is unique to art on glass.

And while the resulting work is one that comes from my own life, I offer it to its new owner as a source of inspiration, letting them interpret it in their own imaginative way.

I’ve been an artist since the age of three – but it took me many years to throw caution to the wind and pursue a full-time path in the arts.

In many ways, my decision to move on from a long career; in development of organisations and people in different countries, culminating in  a successful career in public speaking, mentorship and publishing books has been an exercise in helping me to re-connect with that three-year-old child. With her curiosity. With her imagination. With her constant questioning. And with her ability to stare for ages at a seabird that had wandered into her coastal garden and find real wonder in it. 

They’re virtues that I often thought I’d lost along the path of life – but thankfully they never fully went away. They called to me regularly from the deepest recesses of my soul, like the siren song of the sea.

Eventually, that call became too strong to ignore.

Today, I spend my life as an artist making sense of everything that’s happened to me, of everybody that I’ve loved, of every time that I’ve cried, and of every time that I’ve witnessed and been moved by beauty. 

I see my new quest as setting out ‘A Life On Glass’ through the medium of collage.

It’s a life I’d be delighted to share with you, and hopefully you’ll find the same wonder and magic in it as I have.

Veronica