My journey - extended version

From a young age, I searched for ways to make sense of life. Studying nature gave me one language - a way of seeing patterns and interconnections. Practices like meditation and yoga gave me another - tools to slow down, to cope, to breathe. These explorations shaped my teenage years, offering me both focus and peace.

After graduating in Biological Sciences at Oxford, I left the libraries and laboratories behind to live in the mountains of Spain. There I returned to art, devoting my days to drawing, yoga, and meditation. It was a time of re-centering: finding my way, not through achievement, but through stillness and creation.

In the years that followed I rediscovered the art in my blood. I painted, drew, printed, and began sharing my work online - teaching myself photography, editing, and digital storytelling. I lived in Vietnam for a while, painting with ink and bamboo for hours each day, cooking simple meals, swimming in the ocean. Creativity became inseparable from wellbeing, and life felt spacious, slow, and somewhat whole.

After some time, I was drawn back to Indonesia, where I had first studied coral reefs as an undergraduate. This time I studied the art of tattooing, and discovered an art form that felt like home. Alongside tattooing I supported a marine research organisation, diving on the reefs around Lombok to monitor ecosystem health, writing reports, and caring for street dogs.

Later I returned to the UK, balancing tattooing with a research master’s in marine microplastic microbial biology. I wasn't planning on moving back to the academic world, but I missed it, and simply wanted to be in that environment again, even just for a short while. Between tattoo studios, lecture halls, and research labs, I pushed myself hard, even considering a PhD. But when the pandemic arrived, life shifted, as it did for us all. That taste of the academic world was enough to rekindle the embers, so it was time to move on. I decided to return to Oxford for a while - not as a student this time, but as an artist. There I continued tattooing and writing, before gradually moving my practice to London.

After some years between London and Oxford, I fell in love while travelling through Portugal, and together we later moved to Amsterdam. I immersed myself in tattooing, working alongside some of the world’s best artists and learning daily. But it was also a turbulent time. Brexit restrictions left me in limbo, moving back and forth while waiting for a visa, and inwardly I wrestled with self-doubt, creative blocks, and questions of voice. Out of that chaos, a new practice quietly took root: drawing slowly, meditatively, as a way to find balance when everything else felt uncertain. This practice became the seed for what, years later, grew into The Art of Presence.

Towards the end of my time in Amsterdam I found steadier ground, supported by lots of self-work, therapy and persistence. It was then that I began writing The Art of Presence. Before I could complete it, we left Amsterdam to start a new adventure. For the third time in my life I flew to Indonesia with no return ticket. We explored remote islands and jungles - Sumatra, Sulawesi, Raja Ampat, Java — before continuing to Australia, where I tattooed in Melbourne and Sydney, then New Zealand, and Sri Lanka, where we taught in schools in the remote hills near Kandy. Between adventures, dives and mountain treks, I finished writing The Art of Presence.

After Sri Lanka we returned to Europe. For a time I was in London, tattooing intensively while my partner lived in Berlin. I travelled regularly between the cities and, in those years, I began to find a new kind of peace in the heart of urban life. Having always sought refuge in nature, I learned instead to find compassion in the human world - in its chaos, its closeness, its shared striving.

Today (at the time of writing at least) I am mostly based in Berlin, but I continue to move between London, Oxford, and Amsterdam. Wherever I go, my work circles around the same questions: how can art help us slow down, reconnect with ourselves, and remember that we are part of something larger, living, and endlessly unfolding.