The Pink & Green Co. isn't really a brand I sat down and decided to create. It's what has grown out of trying to work out what comes next.
At the beginning of my twenties, my life was changed by an attack, and the years that followed brought a fair amount of loss, sadness and circumstances I couldn't do much about. Somewhere along the way, I started to feel like I was losing time. Then suddenly 30 was approaching, which felt slightly rude considering I still didn't have a clue what I was doing.
I didn't expect to have everything figured out by 30, but I knew I didn't want to spend another decade waiting for my life to begin.
On a bit of a whim, I moved to a campsite in North Wales. There was something about campsites, nature and a slower way of living that gave me a little sliver of hope. It reminded me that life could be quite simple, and perhaps I didn't need to have the whole thing worked out before I started moving.
So I decided to start again. I left what I knew, gave myself permission to try things, make things, travel, work, fail and generally see what happened.
Somewhere along the way, I found tents. It wasn't necessarily the tents themselves — I became interested in everything that happens around them. People gathering, eating, dancing, getting married, sleeping under canvas, sitting around fires and making music. There's something very old-fashioned about it all. Give people a bit of shelter, some food and a fire and, apparently, we're still pretty happy.
It reminded me that people have always gathered this way. Before venues and hotels and function rooms, there was a bit of land, some shelter and a reason to get everyone together.
I realised I wanted to be part of creating that.
It lit a fire in me, and I started thinking about building a business around tents and events. Something practical that I could build myself and eventually stand on my own two feet with. That became Standing Stones — Tents & Events.
Then, rather unexpectedly, the tents brought me back to art.
I've always made things. I've drawn, painted, designed and built little worlds on paper and screens for as long as I can remember. But somewhere along the way, art had stopped feeling like something I could build a life around. It had become something I used to do.
The tents changed that.
I started seeing them differently — as temporary homes, gathering places and little blank canvases for people to create their own experiences. The more I thought about them, the more I wanted to paint them.
And suddenly, I was painting again.
That became Bay Jemima, the part of my work where I'm now exploring tents, landscapes, gathering and the strange beauty of temporary places. The paintings are connected to Standing Stones too, because I realised that selling my artwork could help me build the business I was dreaming about.
So the plan, in its simplest form, is this: make paintings, sell paintings, buy tents, build Standing Stones and keep going until I've somehow managed to create the bigger thing I'm imagining.
That bigger thing is Moss & Lichen Retreats.
One day, I'd love to have a piece of land somewhere beautiful and build a little sanctuary there. Somewhere with tents tucked into the landscape, trees, fires, good food, music, art and plenty of space to do absolutely nothing for a while. A place where people can come to stay, gather, celebrate, make things or simply get away from their phones for five minutes.
I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to get from painting tents to owning a campsite, but that's never stopped me before.
And that is really what The Pink & Green Co. has become.
It's the umbrella for all the things I'm making while I try to build that future. The Nasty Cow will continue as the clothing and wearable-art side of the business, alongside my older Digital Archive of illustrations and artwork. Bay Jemima is where my current painting work lives, and this Journal is where I can document the whole process — the paintings, the business, the mistakes, the small wins and whatever else happens along the way.
It's not a finished story, and I'm not pretending to have a five-year plan that actually makes sense.
I'm just trying to turn a fairly chaotic chapter of my life into something useful.
For now, I'm painting tents and building a tent business. Hopefully, in time, that business becomes land. And hopefully that land becomes Moss & Lichen Retreats.
It's a long way from where I started, but for the first time in a while, I'm not particularly interested in looking backwards.
I'm just getting on with it.