John is a self-taught third generation papercut artist following in the footsteps of Arthur Forrester (John's grandfather) and John Forrester (John's uncle).

Arthur began cutting silhouette profiles in the early 1920's. His main studios were at Bournemouth, Weston-Super-Mare, Blackpool and finally at Brighton. On his death, his son John took over the Brighton studio and continued to cut profiles until 1976.

In 1990 during a period of unemployment, John Speight discovered a carrier bag full of his uncle's black paper and set about creating a range of contemporary silhouette papercut designs. He decided to discard the family's traditional scissors in favour of a scalpel which enabled much finer detail to be accomplished. His ever changing range of approximately 150 designs are individually hand-cut.