Life & Work in the Manx Hills

I've lived on the Isle of Man for long enough that I can't imagine working anywhere else. Not because nothing else would do, but because the island has become so woven into how I work that the two are hard to separate.

My studio is at Grenaby - in converted farm buildings in the south of the island where nine of us rent space and get on quietly with our own work. Stone walls, high ceilings, the particular quality of light that comes through old windows. Outside, when the weather allows, there's a cottage garden where I sometimes sit to think or sketch or just have a cup of tea and stare at nothing for a few minutes. Ruby, who is a black labrador with strong opinions about where she wants to be at any given moment, generally accompanies me.

The island is small enough that your reputation travels faster than any marketing could.

There's something particular about running a commission-based business on a small island. Almost everyone I've engraved for lives here, or has a connection here, or knows someone I know. Work arrives through conversations, through events, through the kind of word-of-mouth that only happens in a place where everyone has been running into everyone else for decades.

This creates a different kind of accountability to a city business. Not pressure, exactly - more like a quiet awareness that the work you put out will be seen, and that the way you treat people will be remembered. I've found that grounding rather than constraining.

The landscape shapes things too. The Manx hills are right there - visible from the studio, walkable from the farm. When a job is going badly or a decision is taking too long, I find that moving through that landscape tends to sort things out. Something about the scale of it. A problem that felt large in the studio becomes less so on a hillside.

I don't think you have to be on the Isle of Man to understand this. But I do think where you work shapes how you work, more than people usually acknowledge. The pace here, the community, the physical environment - all of it is in what I make.