My creative journey has been for as long as I can remember
I am a multi-passionate creative, artist, designer and maker.
My name is Kay Hancock and I am an artist and designer, my roots are in Derbyshire but I moved to Yorkshire as a child. I have a deep love of nature which started from a very young age. The Trans Pennine Trail was less than 15ft from my home and cows were in the field outside our lounge window. As an only child until 8 years old, I explored the world with my microscope. Discovering new, wonderful hidden worlds captivated me. Evenings were spent gazing out at the stars with my dads binoculars and waiting for the fox to come for food. Every day was a new adventure.
Fascinated by the majesty and mystery of nature, trees, rocks, stars, fungus, fossils and dinosaurs. I spent my whole childhood building dens and treehouses, polishing and painting stones and rocks, doing stone rubbings, making mud, twig and leaf potions and concoctions, flower pressing, scooping out and studying sticklebacks from the babbling stream that ran at the side of my childhood home. And exploring the surrounding fields and marshes that were literally on my doorstep and absolutely always accompanied by my faithful loving black cat, Katy, it was a wonderful life.
Free Spirit, Wild Heart
From 11 I was obsessed with the World Wildlife Fund, constantly petitioning through the Born Free Foundation for the Elefriends Foundation until the ivory ban in 1989. The older I got the more my passion deepened for the natural world.
Later studying Design, Art and Design and Print Origination before starting my career in Graphic Design in the design and print industry. In 2001 I started my own business. I now live in a different part of Yorkshire, still surrounded by animals and nature. The childhood romance I had with my microscope and dads binoculars has simply progressed to a telescope, to aid my obsession with the theory of microcosm and macrocosm.
The childhood home by the trickling stream has been replaced with a home on a river where I can moor boats, the mud and twig mixing has evolved into wreath weaving and pottery. And the Elefriends passion has grown and changed into literally hundreds of animals, wild and domestic I have rescued, nursed and rehomed or released.
Continually changing, growing, progressing.
Some things I leave behind, some things I keep.
I am a multi-passionate creative, artist, designer and maker, who is multi faceted, versatile and intuitive and I express myself and the pieces of work I create in a multitude of ways across many different crafts, continually changing, growing and progressing.
All the different art, styles, techniques, materials and mediums all result in completely different pieces. However, the concept remains the same, the connective thread that weaves them all together is my childhood influences, every single piece of work contains a fragment of myself.
Let go, Be free.
The majority of my pieces are abstract and are intuitively painted, where I completely detach and let go which allows my wild creative heart complete freedom, without the need for approval, expectation, perfectionism or comparison, my dreamtime.
Nature and the natural world are such immense topics that encompass so many things, my main inspirations as a starting point are trees, leaves, the seasons, cells, cell structure, molecules, fossils, sacred geometry, organic texture, animals and insects, space, water, fire, earth, rock and on a broader scale weather, geology, natural history, science, the environment, conservation and evolution.