The first artwork I ever created was a mountain scene, carved into my kitchen table with a butter knife when I was eight years old. I still to this day have no idea what possessed me to do that. Perhaps the same ghost that continues to possess me to create to this day. Luckily, my parents actually quite liked my mountain carving and began a silent faith in my life as an artist from that point forward. I’ve always had an inexplainable obsession with creating something from nothing, Frankenstein-ing unassuming pieces of earth treasure into something people want to look at, something that makes them feel something. Some of my earliest memories are of the fascination that consumed me while watching my dad and granddad work with the piles of treasure they had stored away in the various sheds and barns I spent my childhood orbiting.

I was a pretty lonely kid. I’ve always been held by an alien sense of otherness that I’ve never quite been able to shake. The process of creation has always been something that has given me a great deal of comfort and simply, kept me company for as long as I can remember. I’ve taught myself almost every creative skill I know from watching YouTube videos (one of the genuinely useful perks of being apart of the - otherwise doomed - “world at your fingertips” generation). I’d spend hours watching videos, teaching myself how to create green landscapes and rushing waterfalls out of oil paint, how to make miniature charms out of polymer clay, how to knit, sew, loom, crochet, how to make wallets out of duct tape, how to do just about anything available to be learned through the internet. I would beg my mum to take me to the local craft store at every opportunity I could. I was routinely embarrassed that I spent so much of my time in the same places as old women. I realised after a while that I must have taught myself something special, when I received consistent validation for my creation, and won my school art competition three years in a row. I saw how the faces of adults would light up as I sat before an oil painting, or won a new stereo with a blue first place ribbon. They told me how successful I was going to be one day, how much money I could make from my god-given talents. This seemed to make them very happy. I always kind of felt like a fraud. It didn’t feel like I had some great gift, but just that I had taught myself how to do these things when I was alone.

When I was fifteen, I became infatuated with anything and everything taking place in from of a camera. Film, TV, music videos, it all seemed to ignite a fire in me unlike anything I had ever felt before. I remember desperately (and unsuccessfully) trying to rally a group of kids at school to work on a short film with me. I can still see the vision I had for this project. I saw girls in white dresses holding hands and spinning in a circle on a green field. There was another girl watching them from a far, catching bright glimpses of them in between branches of trees and behind tall hedges. Although this project was never actualised, I remember thinking that the coolest thing I could ever do with my life, was get together with a group of people and make something like that vision I saw in my head. Despite the creation of a unique body of work seeming near impossible at this time, I was graciously blessed with an enormous collection of home movies, which became a golden fountain of material placed in starved hands. Every birthday, graduation or notable event for any one of my family members was met with a tear jerking montage of our childhoods immortalised on tape. In my continuous unravelling of these home movies, I uncovered a great and life changing secret. This being that there is no manmade footage in the world, more raw, real or entirely encapsulating than someones home movies. It isn’t really the moment they aim to capture, or the divinely static blur of outdated technology, but all of the moments caught in-between, when the camera wasn’t supposed to be looking, or asking questions that nobody had the answers to. I still greatly consider these home movies an heirloom-ed magnum opus of sorts, and a significant pillar of my stylistic compass today.

Through some process of divine intervention, this new found infatuation with digital media was quickly proceeded with my discovery of photographer and director, Petra Collins. This discovery must be mentioned, as it meant everything in carving out the path I have been on for the last ten years. I can’t quite remember how it was I first discovered this new god. What I can remember, is that I was completely spellbound, transfixed, the stars that aimlessly littered my galaxy had aligned in great shapes. I felt connected to her work and unique vision in a way I had never experienced before. She captured the tilted view of the world I had thought to be experiencing on my own my whole life. I felt an immediate kinship to her eerily nostalgic lens, which is said to be inspired by her very own collection of home movies and childhood photos. I saw in her the same intense force I had within myself, the same near puppet like need to dive beyond the surface, to weave together the most delicately beautiful and darkly strange of things, to make something divine that other people found uncomfortable and weird. Completely affirmed by this parasocial soul tie, I knew what I had to do from that point forward - I needed to make films, I needed to take photos.

After high school, I did what any other overwhelmed and completely directionless eighteen year old would do, and enrolled in university. I majored in screen production, which seemed like the traditional and least risky path to somehow becoming a director one day. Despite going into lockdown two weeks into my time on campus, I went on to spend a handful of years learning and being assessed on subjects you couldn’t pay me to remember today. I was studying film because I loved making things, it seemed fun to learn about, and quite frankly, I didn’t know where else I should be. However, I quickly realised that the industry I was falling into, was filled with a lot of desperate, dangerously self centred people, who were willing to do whatever they had to, hurt whoever they had to, to get what they wanted. I suppose there are people like that in every industry. As much as I have ever cared about the things that drive my very life force, I could never be compelled to care that much. Nothing is that serious, no one is that important. I felt embarrassed, exhausted and entirely misplaced being apart of it all. I felt myself being pushed harder down a ladder I had no real interest in climbing, and the glittering prize was another decade of internships at news channels and stuffy companies and a lot of being told “there’s just no work in the creative industry”. I realised then, that this is the cross you have to bear when you when you choose the “traditional and least risky path”… I told myself in that moment, If i was going to be a starving artist, I was going to starve for something I actually cared about. I was going to figure out a way to achieve every one of my wildest creative dreams on my own, and dropped out in an email.

In late 2022 I started my first business, ‘Meadow Lane’, where I began selling vintage, handmade and up-cycled products right off my bedroom floor. It was a passion project that completely saved and changed the trajectory of my life. At its genesis, I was rebuilding my entire world from the ground up. I had a collection of brutal circumstances unfold in quick succession, that shook my life so severely, that when I finally came up for air, nothing other than my own health and happiness seemed to matter. I know now that this time in my life happened for a great reason. I was forced to surrender to the only life that I really wanted, the life I felt compelled to live all along but struggled to accept due to fear of judgement, instability and failure. In May of 2023, I shot my first large scale commercial clothing campaign. I met up with three girls at a motel, one of them I barely knew and two of them were complete strangers. In the span of a couple hours it felt like we had all known each other for a very long time. I gave the girls white out contact lenses, told them never to smile, in fact to look as mean, miserable and flat out demonic as possible and posed them in vintage clothing around a wood panelled motel room. At the time I was completely transfixed with mermaids and sirens, their dark, alluring and deadly nature. I resonated deeply with the delicious female freedom in their fatal power, the kind of freedom I’ve always associated with the classic symbols of the open road. I entitled the campaign, ‘Motel Pool Mermaids’. I still consider this day to be one of the most fulfilling days of my life. I had finally realised my dream of bringing a creative vision to life with a group of people who seemed to understand it. I had successfully done what fifteen year old me had deemed the coolest thing I could ever do, and I figured out how to do it all on my own.

Meadow Lane taught me so much. It allowed me to hone my skills, take risks, fail, succeed and align myself with an audience of people who connected deeply to my work and wanted to see my succeed. It provided me with an immeasurable amount of knowledge as well as a confidence in myself and my art that I will take with me throughout the rest of my life and career. I decided to retire the business in early 2025 to focus on broadening my work, as well as building a slower and more intentional practice. I created more art in 2025 than I have since I was a child. I felt that freedom again, that unquestioned curiosity and the pure joy of making things. I discovered a new love of working with found objects as well as returning to my roots as an oil painter. I worked on a number of editorial shoots which allowed me to explore the thematic and aesthetic range I felt limited in when creating for a branded business. I believe that my recent work has allowed me to come closer to uncovering the voice and style I have been aiming to define over the course of my creative career, and I can feel it growing and evolving all the time.

There are so many things I want to do and be in this life, and I believe that the process of creation is the key to all of them. I can’t wait to see all that the future holds. I have a strange feeling it’s going to be better than I could ever imagine. I hope to see you there around each new corner.

That’s all for now.

Love, Anna

(Last updated, March 2026)