Tell us something about where you come from.

I'm from a place where old Latvian recipes are written onto scraps of paper, folded and refolded so many times that if you held them for too long they'd break into a million tiny squares.

List 5 words that describe you.

Falling over herself like a foal.

Who are some people you admire?

All the ones creating/making/doing what they love and pursuing what completes them both in Art and in life.

Where do you get your inspiration?

Everywhere. From music, stories, from a faded old photograph, lists, old books, mistakes, the spaces between people, diagrams, the things I see in the street like a phone number scribbled onto a napkin fluttering along the foot path like a paper moth.

How would you describe your work?

It’s a scene from a story or it’s the quirky nuances in the everyday. Messy little drawings, collages, paintings, and the writing of tiny stories so small you can hardly see them.
 
List your 3 favourite things.

-the crackly sound that record players make.
-eyes, for looking with and looking into.
-Michel Gondry's short film "three dead people" where a horse runs down escalators, across coloured pencils, and along a beach.

What do you do for fun?

I recite Zhukovsky while baking heart shaped lamingtons and telling lies. ha ha!

What's the most essential item in your creative process?

Time.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m part of an Artist Collaborative/Duo called Greedy Hen and we're like little factory workers. At the moment I’m working on a new series of Artist Books, an instillation piece, and an illustration for a new record cover to be released later this year. I’m also working on a Greedy Hen web site ( www.greedyhen.com) which will be up and running eventually, and also an artwork to contribute to a magazine publication to be out in December/January.


Do you have a career highlight?

Hhhmm ...there's too many highlights, it’s practically fluoro.

What's the next thing on the cards for you and your Art? Any big plans?

My ongoing projects consisting of record and book covers, magazine contribution, painting, drawing, collage and other forms of illustration. Ongoing projects with Greedy Hen, exhibition of an instillation work in late 2006 or early 2007 (location to be finalised later this year), part of the Cover Versions group show in the U.K, a new series of Greedy Hen Artist Books available December 2006, and what ever else I stumble into......because as long as I'm creating things and trying to solve visual problems I know I'll be O.K.

Noise is...only loud if you're listening.

If you could be anybody else, who would you be?

A character from a 1920's or 1930's silent film so I can say everything without talking.

What has been the biggest challenge for you so far?

Understanding that not everyone "gets" it.

How do you feel about being a SOYA finalist?

Like I’m a character in a fiction novel and this is the part in the story where, being both over whelmed and amazed, I put down the phone and fall off my chair.


What will you do with your prizes if you win?

Do a substantial print run of the next series of Greedy Hen Artist Books, go to Tokyo, New York, and Eastern Europe to research and find reference material (ie -old photographs, fabrics, second hand books, old stories, hand writing, stamps),  talk with people, galleries, and Artists working over there, distribute and push my work further out into the world and take pieces of it back with me.