Twenty odd years as an artist has made me pretty resilient when it comes to reckoning with what I’ve done all day. There can be days when I’ve only moved a couple of things from one side of the studio to the other, barely tickled a bit of paper with a stick of dead tree, drunk half a dozen cans of Diet Coke to summon the creative juices, crumpled everything I’ve done for the last 3 weeks huffily in a black bin bag, and still managed to walk home with enough self-worth to get up and do the same the next day.

Earlier this month our mum, always “Maw” to her kids, died after six long years of vascular dementia. The finality of it, coupled with trying to excavate memories ahead of her funeral has sent me into a frantic tailspin since, wondering whether I could still remember who she’d been before the disease. Our Maw, our real Maw, was already much more deeply buried in my memory than I wanted to admit.

The path to the studio was like something from a fairy tale; glorious, undulating hills with twisting, partly scalped but seriously charismatic cork and olive trees. No roads in sight or traffic noise, just high-pitched birdsong and the occasional clanking rustic bell round the neck an of animal or two.

An old friend still reminds me of the day we met, when I turned up in our communal kitchen on the first day of term in halls in 1994 Aberdeen and unpacked my kitchen “essentials”, a pineapple and a bottle of vodka, while our flatmates arranged their teabags and Tupperware. I was already performing the adult life I’d imagined for myself: pure Joan Collins, kaftaned and drunk, with a complete rejection of anything that hinted at drudgery.

Following my gold-medal-winning PFO (the one where I fell out of a window while travelling alone in Bali and survived), I somehow got on a flight, seriously injured, determined that no one should notice. I was simply focused on getting to the other side, where I’d go straight to hospital. Despite being frighteningly weak, and genuinely concerned I might croak it mid-air, Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Hercame to mind like a mirage of black, camp humour, which somehow helped me through.

Throughout my childhood our dad kept racing pigeons in a manky loft in the garden, training them sporadically for what he saw as the holy grail: the timed race back from France. Some of this training, for reasons known only to him, began in our school playground, about forty minutes’ drive from our house. At least once a week he would pull up at the gates in his battered Volvo with opera blaring, climb out in his work suit lightly upholstered with straw, and release the pigeons from the boot while other parents dropped off their children in a more standard fashion.

I can’t remember a time in my life when I have felt powerful, it’s not a word I’ve ever thought of in connection with myself, but that’s how I felt when I spoke that evening. Truth to power. Honesty to foster change. I’m struggling to recognise myself with this chat but I think that it’s growth!

During my final year of art school in 1998 I had a yukka plant called JaJa. There was something about the exotic spikiness of her leaves that sparked my imagination and took me away from the grey oppressive skies of NE Scotland to far off Copacabana rooftops and saxophone solos in poolside bars. Jaja resided in my boudoir in an Aberdonian squat and somehow survived the endless mental parties, the fag ends and disembodied dreadlocks which often ended up in her pot.

When he died some years ago, it was decided that the piano should come to live with me, though even now, the emotional weight that’s attached to sitting on that very same stool, is almost too much to bear. When it does sporadically happen, I try to keep it light with a bit of Patsy Cline or equivalent, finally giving the piano a taste of the life it should have had.

“Change happens when the pain of staying the same outweighs the fear of change”, said a wise person once, not too sure who, but this is without a doubt what happened for me. Talking about needing to change but not doing it and not knowing how, made me boring to listen to but also frustrated, sad, angry and my confidence and self-esteem were on a steep downhill slope.

The last 8 or 9 months has been a very uncomfortable period for me as an artist as I’ve been moving through a big old creative block and a massive transition within my practice.