The Liverpool Studio - Where the Gorm Collection Was Made

My first professional art studio was a corner of a converted office building in Liverpool.

Above Specsavers. Above McDonald's. Shared with seven other artists.

It wasn't glamorous. It was exactly what I needed.

A Quiet Year of Transition

A few years earlier I'd been living in Chester with my ex-fiancé. When that relationship ended I stayed another year - quiet, reflective, figuring out what came next. My flat had no room for painting so I started looking for a studio.

When an art charity offered me a space in Liverpool I said yes immediately.

My corner of the old office room, shared with 7 other artists, this was my first professional art studio in Liverpool. 

That corner of a room became the beginning of something important.

Creating Through Solitude

I was newly single with a lot of time on my hands. So I poured myself into the work.

Just me, the enamel and the brush. Focused in a way I hadn't been in years.

I experimented with canvas during this period, trying to translate my signature marks onto a different surface. The same magic from the enamel wasn't quite there. I filed that away and kept going. I'll return to canvas eventually with new materials like resin - but the timing has to be right.

Early canvas experiments in the Liverpool studio - testing whether enamel marks could translate. They couldn't. Not yet..

What a Shared Studio Teaches You

Working beside seven other artists taught me something I hadn't expected: the atmosphere of a space gets into the work.

Some days the room buzzed. Other days unspoken frustration or doubt lingered in the air. I noticed how easily I absorbed what surrounded me and how much it affected what I was making.

I learned that I work better alone.

Solitude brings clarity. It lets the work breathe. It lets intuition rather than noise guide the process. That's been true ever since.

The Work That Came From It

While I was in that Liverpool studio I was deep in the testing phase of the fine art print series - working with print studios in Manchester and London to get the quality right. It was slow and expensive. The quality had to be right so I kept going.

I made around ten original paintings in that studio.

Three of them went on to exhibit in Madrid, Brussels and Milan.

The street below the studio. Liverpool in full hum.

That quiet corner above Specsavers produced work that ended up in international shows. That still surprises me when I think about it.

The Work That Emerged

Eventually Liverpool felt heavy. On a low day I rang my parents and they said - come home.

Two weeks later I was on a ferry across the Irish Sea.

That studio will always hold something important for me, a space where I rebuilt, found a working rhythm and made some of the best work of my life to that point.

Today in my Irish studio I carry those lessons with me. Protect the space. Work alone. Trust what the environment is telling you.

The collections made during and after that Liverpool chapter are here:

Explore the collection → HERE

View available origInals → HERE