Natalie Winterlich

The unknowables of the pandemic arrested my writing for a bit. I was sitting at my desk in 2020, worried about my sick father, unable to cross the country to visit home, and I didn’t have the headspace to write. But, to stay sane and balanced (sane-ish, at least), I have to write. So, I began to dredge up some of the stories swashing in my sea of ideas – possible future projects – and there was Anne Bonny: a young Irish woman, tried for piracy in Jamaica in the 1720s.

This image is about the lightbulb moments that have come to me while commuting to work on the Dart: ideas from photographs I took, to the inspiration I get from the sky, the sea and, as a gardener, from flowers and their symbolism (the language of flowers). I’m a designer and artist. For five years I commuted on the Dart. The year I started was the same year I started to teach myself Illustrator, which I became engrossed with, and the journeys became a huge inspiration for my art.