MY STORY
Born in Cape Town, I moved to London as a teenager. I studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University, followed by an art foundation course in London at Central Saint Martins. This detour led me on to a very different life path than the one Oxford seemed to be laying out for me, one I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams .
In 1999, my artist husband Ralph Lazar and I packed in our (relatively) ‘proper’ jobs and moved to the Seychelles for a year. There we worked on projects that became our creative studio Last Lemon, which is still going strong today.
Then one day in 2004 (back in London), I placed a chewed-up architect’s model inside a wooden Ikea box and something magical happened – life was breathed into that little guy and the space in the box opened up to infinity. I had created an entire parallel universe! Godlike. And the Glass Cathedrals concept was born.
After building my art business in London – organising big ramshackle art shows with Ralph in the East End and being represented by some amazing small galleries on the art fair circuit – in 2010 I moved with my family to Marin, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in California.
There I began my ‘labours of love’ projects, including The Traveling Bookbox Show (the essence of books in boxes), Cinerama (cinematic dramas in sparkling dioramas), Starstuff (portraits of illuminating people) The Swerling Circus of Small, and the politically motivated In the Now series. Since 2022 I’ve been back in brilliant London, with regular pilgrimages to Southern Africa, land of my heart.
In 2026 I am curating my first group art exhibition Heathbound. From shimmering aerial views of the ponds as they chart the River Fleet, to relief sculptures carved from ancient fallen oak, this is the Heath as you’ve never seen it before – North London’s precious urban wilderness seen through artists’ eyes.
My art retrospective memoir A Life in Miniature comes out in 2027.
