A very deliberate feature of my work, based on sea and land, has been the exclusion of the human form. My work has always been about my personal relationships and responses to the environment.

Occasionally, I explore our human impact on the local landscape, including lanes, stone walls and tumbledown buildings… but this is usually to describe how Nature reclaims and re-absorbs after our interruptions.

And so now - to the beach. None of us is unaware of the massive global problem of plastics in our waters. The island of debris in the Pacific; the creatures, strangled, maimed and killed by plastics and other waste floating in our oceans.

It is our global shame.

Each tide disgorges yet more fragments of our negligence and indifference on to the shores.

Bizarrely, these shards of bright coloured plastics often sparkle amongst the seaweed on the wrack line, like toxic jewels.

I have always eschewed them and refused to include them in my work. Then I started to wonder if this was naivety: that I needed to reference them within the context of examining the wrack line and my interest in the flotsam and jetsam that turns up on our beaches.

I had also become bolder in exhibiting my mixed media work. I have always used collage and found objects, but rarely showed these pieces. They were for my private contemplation. Work included in exhibitions had always been paintings, drawings or prints.

I suddenly felt released to exhibit the full panoply of work from the studio – from detailed observational drawings to complex mixed media works. This is what I am about: not hog-tied to one form of expression.

Meanwhile, and more importantly, we do need to highlight the reality of our seas and landscape. This is what it is like. As ever, I strive to make the results crafted, composed and beautiful for the soul – but they have an edge of insistence that we face the reality of the harm we are doing to our world.