It's clear this is not a craft that everyone would be happy practising day in, day out. ‘I can sometimes spend a whole week just sanding and polishing. I think you've got to be a very specific sort of person to be okay with that.’ She is, she believes, the only contemporary artist in the UK making this type of lacquerware. Alongside a lack of teaching, barriers to entry for aspiring japanners include the cost of materials and the necessity for expensive equipment. Riddell uses an air-fed respirator and a small extraction room to filter out shellac fumes. Nonetheless, she says there could be a bright future for her chosen craft – if enough people encounter it: ‘Those who learn japanning become obsessed with it. It's just such a beautiful process; the effects are like nothing else I've seen.’
Her south-west London studio is in Merton Abbey Mills, which was once a factory producing William Morris textiles for Liberty & Co (‘They used to wash all the fabrics in the chalk stream outside my window’). The great craft champion would have approved of this current occupant. Riddell works slowly and carefully, largely to please her own tastes, with occasional commissions dotted in her calendar. Her works are popular with collectors whose love of art is equalled by their love for the natural world, she says – ‘people who see magic in both’.
For her solo exhibition In Shadows at Messums London this summer, Riddell will show 20 works inspired in part by science fiction movies and biology books such as Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, which explores the extraordinary lifeform of fungi. At the show’s centre will be her largest work to date: an as-yet-untitled piece made up of nine panels, together standing over two metres tall. It combines observations of the stream outside her studio – brimming with trout, despite its urban course – and details of Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s Lake District farmhouse (‘I was obsessed with her as a child'). Both are given a fantastical twist: birds decorate trees with foxglove flowers, while dragonflies collect reeds to build structures. ‘I want to capture what I see going on in these places – and also what I would want to see,’ she says. Both inquisitive and imaginative, Riddell reveals the magic hiding in plain sight.