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Jackie's background was in Fine Art but she has always had a passion for Theatre. Never wanting to act she was always excited by large scale stage sets, costumes, lighting and music. During her degree she studied the relationship of objects in a three dimensional space and played with illusions of depth and trompe l'oeil. Her early paintings explored these subjects, experimenting with line and shape, architecture, perspective and pattern.
Initially painting stage sets for the theatre allowed her to explore the relationship of art and design and create structures on a much larger scale than was possible in the studio. Jackie naturally moved into design and her strong illustrative sense has enabled her to continue to create imaginary worlds both for adults and children. Her fascination with how something can be recognisably one thing, yet magically transform into another has been the key to her design work and made her work especially appealing to younger audiences.
Jackie believes that inspiring the adult audiences of the future must begin with stimulating the imagination of children. Finding inventive ways to present story telling and embracing new technology are the things which inspire her creativity. New ways of approaching a settings and characters and to imagine the world in which they exist, theatre allows the possibility to play and to guide an audience through a full scale live experience, not possible to re create in film and television. This makes the theatre a truly magical place.
Jackie is known mostly for designing the large scale UK and international touring production adaptations of great children's literature; from the world of Terry Deary's Horrible Histories, Michael Morpurgo's, Philip Pullman's and David Almond's amazing writing for young audiences, to David Walliams's epic children's adventures.