I was born and I grew up in Cardiff, Wales. I left school, did a Foundation Arts course, worked at a city farm, and spent a couple of years as on the dole, then I studied Humanities at the Polytechnic of Wales. My main subjects in the third year were Ceramics, Women's History and Women in Society. I didn't touch a computer until about 1991 when I started to play with an Amiga in the art room. Once I left college, I took a course in the local ITeC to learn word processing, spreadsheets and databases. The 'training' experience was gastly but it deepened my interest in the social impact of computer technology, I was particularly interested in learning about the Internet. I then studied MA Ceramics in Cardiff in the early 90s. After I left college I continued my studies and practice through a period of patchy employment.

My intention was to digitise pictures of my ceramic work, eventually this did happen, but not for several years. I started writing this website in 1996.I didn't own a computer at that time. Instead, I used to walk purposefully into college libraries and computing labs and act like I had a right to be there. I had left college with an Masters degree in Ceramics in 1994 but employers were not exactly beating a path to my door. A friend advised me to write my pages in notepad rather than use a page editing program. My early pages were unspectacular, but hand crafted.

However, my interests lay in the structure and content of the site, rather than the details of the coding. I used whatever HTML editing tools came to hand. I didn't want the site to have a conventional structure, I wanted to create a digital equivalent of a sketchbook I wasn't so interested in using conventional navigation in the site either. I figured that anyone who wanted to have a real root around in here would be smart enough to find the 'back' button in their browser.

I started making pages before I had any webspace. I figured that it would come along when I needed it, and it did.

One of the first pages that I put together was this a memorial page to a friend. Somehow I had ended up with stack of her poems and decided that I would like to put them out there.

I then started beyond. I had adopted 'beyond utility' as my makers mark while in college in Ponty, continued using it during my masters, so I decided to continue using it as my 'brand' as what I was producing as art was beyond being useful. 'utilly' became my on screen persona.

I had recently been working on a series of photographs of 'utilly' and wanted to try and do something with as well as learning how to put anchors in text and work with multiple folders. Also, I had just bought my first digital camera so, I wanted to play with images. I thought that I would take photos of the paintings that I had been working before started working for NTL (which either stemed from, or caused an almost clinical depression). As I was now working in Newport, I recorded a couple of journeys to work over Christmas in 1997. I liked the anonimity of the images, they could have been almost anywhere.

Martin, a friend from when I worked in the Cardiff Cybercafe, set up a server called custard. He kindly offered me a subdomain. http://bitter.custard.org became my URL.

I worked for NTL for about 3 years, during which time I spent some time exploring the web whilst giving out technical support. I started correspondences with several women that I met online and attempted a creative collaborative with them called Intimate Strangers. I had already become quite intimate with one of the strangers, Fling. More than seven years on, we are still together, living in West Wales.