After an army childhood of frequent moves at home and abroad, Valerie grew up with a deep love of travel. She studied textiles in the troubled late 1960’s at Hornsey and Croydon colleges of art. Following graduation, she spent a year in Sweden working in the design studios of Gustavsberg’s Ceramic studios near Stockholm, then four years in Paris working for the Trianon Press on hand coloured facsimiles of the print works of William Blake. Returning to England to take a post graduate course in art therapy led to many years working as an art therapist in hospitals and specialist schools.

She describes her present work as influenced by those years as a therapist; narrative visual stories which form a framework, sometimes touching the absurd, or reaching out to look at the thought shadows that lurk within the mind and emerge in dreams.
 Many of her most recent prints and mixed media pieces take a whimsical look at the language of interaction, glimpsed encounters and human interaction with the intention of tickling the imagination and creating their own fantasy places.
Another area of development comes from a recent discovery and love for the Indian Sub Continent; these are created from sketches, photographs, and ideas collected whilst travelling.
The work is always about colour, often experimental, and usually looks with fondness and affection at ourselves as the complex human beings we are.