Art has always been around me and a part of my life, so I didn't wake up one day and decide I was going to be a sculptor.

Growing up, my mum would get bags of clay and we would make green man masks. I even spent far longer than I care to admit hammering nails into logs; perhaps my first dabble in abstract art.

At 13, I was forced by illness to cut back on my schooling. I was too ill to leave the house and sat my exams at home, attended by invigilators. I would recover just enough to attend school, but my health was always on a knife edge, and I had to make sure I paced my activities.

When I was at school, I credit the head our art department for allowing my creativity to run wild. It became such a fun way for me to express myself and decompress after a three-hour physics lesson. I made everything from desktop card sculptures to life-size steel figures in these lessons.

It was a hugely informative time where I really began to find my style.

Despite this passion, I decided that architecture was a wonderful way to create sculptures of the grandest scale and also take home a reliable paycheck. Then, just a month into my studies, I had a severe flare-up of my condition and deferred entry until the following year. This led to me dropping out which was heart breaking. I underwent a number of tests, from MRI scans to biopsies, with specialists giving different opinions on what was wrong.

I was eventually diagnosed with Colitis in my early twenties. Due to also having Ehlers Danlos syndrome (EDS) I was left in constant pain with headaches, gastric discomfort, and muscle pains.

Now, just a few years later, my work is on in display in a major city in the UK and I’ve been commissioned by the commonwealth games.

Working for myself gives me flexibility to work around my condition.

When symptoms flare-up, I can stop, recover, and go again. Fortunately, I have learned to manage my condition, so these flare-ups are not too frequent. I rely on medication and manage my activity levels to try and maintain a consistent lifestyle.

On occasion I steal from tomorrow's energy to have a busy day, but this always feels like tempting fate. I can, for the most part, work as most of the world considers usual. Flare-ups can leave me unable to do much more than the daily basic tasks required for sustenance but working for myself means that I generally set my own deadlines and can account for this.

This meditative break from pain can act as a reset and is sometimes what I need to recover from particularly long flare-ups. I am hugely lucky that my work has become something that relaxes me and makes me healthy. There is, on the flipside, the stress of managing projects and sculpture installations but I am gaining confidence in the people I work with, so these stresses are being alleviated.

My health deteriorated at a point in my life when I was hugely active. I went from going to county trials for rugby, doing extracurricular drama and being all round sporty, to practically bed bound. It felt like it happened overnight.

Despite not being able to give one hundred percent to sporting pursuits, I can still create a semblance of physical perfection. It’s a rebellion against my own adversity.

This past year I have started being open about my health issues and I've already had some exciting ideas about how to create a piece about my conditions. Hopefully, other sufferers of Crohn’s, Colitis, EDS, or other chronic conditions may be able to relate to these. It will be my form of self-examination.

When you look back at art history there are lots of examples of artists who were physically unwell. Frida Kahlo, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, and Michelangelo all drew inspiration from their disability, to name but a few.

My advice to any aspiring artists with chronic illness is to just give it a go. If you can find something that you have a passion for and can make it what you do, you might just find it's what you need.

If you work hard enough at a hobby there's no reason it shouldn't become a way of making a living.

It's not always going to be easy but it'll sure be exciting.