✨ Now shipping worldwide — from my little Devon studio to wherever you are

“Rooted in care. Growing through creativity. Shared with love.”

For many years, I worked in secondary, Primary and special needs schools — environments full of heart, hope, and extraordinary children, but also systems that quietly ask too much of the adults within them. Teaching is a profession built on care. It requires empathy, patience, emotional labour, and a willingness to give far more than the job description ever admits. And yet, those same qualities are not always extended back to the people who give them.

Like many teachers, I gave everything I had. My evenings, weekends, holidays, energy, and sense of self. Teaching wasn’t just a job — it was my vocation, my identity, the thing I had worked so hard to build. People often talk about “work–life balance”, but when you care deeply about the young people you support, the line between the two becomes almost impossible to hold.

What many outside education don’t see is the pressure, the scrutiny, the isolation, and the quiet ways staff can be worn down. I’ve experienced workplace cultures where kindness was scarce, where support was inconsistent, and where the humanity of staff was overlooked. These cultures don’t arise from children. They arise from leadership — from the tone set by managers, heads of department, and senior staff. Those in positions of responsibility shape the emotional climate of a school, and they carry a duty of care not only to students but to the adults who serve them. When that duty is overlooked, the consequences ripple deeply. I’ve seen colleagues torn down when they should have been lifted up. I’ve lived it myself.

My decline never came from the children — not once. It came from the systems around them. From environments where fear, workload, and pressure shaped behaviour more than compassion did.

Eventually, my mind and body reached a point where they simply couldn’t continue. I experienced two breakdowns in my career — collapses that stripped me back to the bones of who I was. They were devastating, disorienting, and deeply lonely. Leaving the role I loved wasn’t rejection. It was survival. It was choosing my wellbeing over expectations. It was stepping away so I could breathe again, feel again, and eventually find my way back to myself.

I still grieve what I lost — the community I thought I’d retire with, the identity I’d built, the sense of belonging I believed was unshakeable. But grief doesn’t mean bitterness. It means something mattered.

In the slow, quiet work of rebuilding myself, I returned to creativity. Clay became a lifeline — a way to reconnect with the parts of myself I had lost. From that healing came Sculpt Happy Studio, a space where making could be gentle, grounding, and joyful.

Little Light Art arrived later, born from a deeper understanding of what I needed to separate and protect. My handmade clay art and silver jewellery belong to one world — the world of craft, design, and personal expression. But my community work needed its own home. A softer home. A place where people could come not just to make, but to breathe, to feel held, to reconnect with themselves and others. Little Light Art became that home — a community arm shaped by lived experience, compassion, and the belief that creativity can be a form of care.

Tiny Tails was born from the same place of rebuilding. Mim, and the woodland companions who followed, carry the messages I needed most when I was at my lowest: that softness is strength, that rest is allowed, that you are not alone, that you can begin again. Through their stories, photography, music, and poems, I hope to shine a small light for others — especially those navigating challenge, turmoil, or upheaval of any kind.

You don’t have to have lived my story to understand struggle. Challenge, turmoil, and upheaval touch all of us in different ways, at different times, and for reasons that are often invisible from the outside. Whatever your story, whatever you’re carrying, you are welcome in this space. Tiny Tails exists for anyone who needs a moment of gentleness, a reminder of their own worth, a companion in the dark.

My hope is that through my work — whether clay, community workshops, or the stories of Tiny Tails — someone else might feel a little less alone in their own struggle. A little more seen. A little more understood. A little more hopeful.

Because no one should have to break to be valued. And no one should have to rebuild alone.

If you’re in that place now, please know you are not broken. You are becoming — and becoming takes strength & courage. Stepping away from the life you thought would be your forever is terrifying, but you are not alone in that.

You are seen. You are brave. And you will always have a safe space here.