In September 1966 my sister, mother and I took off from Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires. Eighteen hours later we landed in the UK. I was sixteen years old, and I never went back. It was hard adapting to this new life. I missed the large blue skies, the warmth, the smells, the bright colours and the language.

Twenty-six years later I moved from London to Dartmoor. Again, it felt like I was crossing a vast ocean to settle in a place I knew nothing about. The winters were long, cold and damp and spring took forever to arrive. I tried to find some common ground, a link with this unfamiliar landscape. It took a while.

I rambled the moor and began to find connections between its vastness and the Patagonian plains of my childhood. Gorse, green alkanet, tormentil, purslane have become part of my colour palette as have ladies’ slippers, barberries and the wild lupins of my early memories. I paint these colours onto my silk and merino wool shawls.

I never have a design plan; I work straight onto the cloth making one-off pieces with hand-mixed dyes, paper stencils and small screens for fine detail.

This is how it goes: a silver-grey Dartmoor sky becomes a backdrop to bright gorse yellow, which is also the hue of a South American summer.