Back in 2018, I inherited a remarkable collection of my grandmother Gwendoline’s suitcases. For a long time, they just sat in my studio gathering dust, quietly holding the stories of all the places she had travelled. One day, I spread them out across the floor like a map, and something shifted. I stopped seeing them as simple objects and started seeing them as sturdy, historical frames – containers for entirely new worlds.

Around that same time, our family moved into a large warehouse with our two young children. It was an open space with very little separation between rooms, and whenever their friends came over, they’d comment on how unusual our home felt. It got me thinking about what home really means – how it’s defined, and how differently it can be experienced.

Out of that came the idea of a floor plan for our ‘strangely normal’ home, creating little dioramas within each room, where the everyday and the imagined could exist side by side. The project was also inspired by a poem I once came across by an unknown author -

Welcome to our humble home.
Full of standard, everyday goings-on.
Full of mundane chores and the buzz of regular life.
Which is really a secret code for: here live the most magical creatures and superheroes,
living the greatest love story of all time.

This body of work became an installation titled Floor Plan, which later found a home at Murdoch Children’s Hospital in Western Australia, thanks to the support of Linton and Kay Galleries.

From there, the project continued to grow into the book Our Strangely Normal Home, where I could expand further – through illustration – on the myths and magic that have become part of our family’s folklore. Along the way, I had the priviledge of collaborating with the amazing photographer Robert Frith and brilliant graphic designer Lowana Bibby of insomnia design, who helped transform my illustrations into the final book.