Smile (give us one), 2026, builders gloves and canvas, 2.4m x 1m photo: Article Studio

As a young woman living in London in the 1980’s I would carry my keys as a weapon. I was frequently told to smile, I was spat at, I had eggs thrown at me, I would take long detours to avoid building sites.

wooden helmet containing crushed, powdered paracetamol, wooden block plinth and acrylic vitrine

Ache, 2026, paracetamol, helmet, wood block stand, acrylic vitrine, 104cm x 40cm x 48cm photo: Article Studio

Ache explores tensions between conviction and uncertainty through the collection and transformation of commonplace medication. This assemblage of crushed paracetamol, helmet, vitrine and plinth, presents an uneasy space between care and harm, protection and vulnerability, and rationality and absurdity. I was interested in people’s urge to hoard paracetamol during the pandemic. Ache has a temporal and emotional weight: the work accumulated slowly, shaped by a collective atmosphere of fear, uncertainty and anticipated suffering. Paracetamol is ambivalent — an everyday, readily available remedy that offers relief while carrying the potential for serious harm. The helmet, representing a head, becomes a point of connection being at once a physical structure, a vessel for consciousness and a site of pain. Contained within the helmet, a structure designed to protect the head, the white powder becomes an unsettling inversion of its original purpose: a substance associated with alleviating pain is placed inside an object associated with preventing injury, yet neither can guarantee protection. I wanted to give this work the authority of a scientific specimen or museum artefact whilst provoking a suggestion of illegality, introducing further tension between the material's ordinary status and the viewer’s uneasy response to its accumulation.

Helmet, 2026, human hair, stitch holder, mild steel, found wood, 26cm x 44cm x 40cm photo: Article Studio

I’ve been saving my hair since it grew long in lockdown. In Helmet, human hair evokes the relationship between the body, identity and cultural memory. Its ordinary intimacy and the notion of self presentation and even beauty is shadowed by hair’s capacity to hold histories of violence, dehumanisation and exploitation. Amongst these collective histories my own grey strands intermingled with my slightly ‘younger’ hair register the passage of time within the material itself, making the work a record of bodily change and a provocation on the difficult notion of revulsion around bodies (and ageing) via a human body part that is universally and commercially entwined with ideas of beauty, youth and fashion. A sense of display, restraint and ritual suggested by the interplay of the steel arms, stitch-holding pin and felted roll of hair bring a tenderly ceremonial feeling to the work. The title ‘Helmet’ invokes the protective shell of the skull, but the helmet is fashioned from something grown by the body rather than imposed upon it. In this sense, protection becomes less a matter of armour than of attending to what is vulnerable, personal and historically burdened.

plaster cast, aluminium, vitrine, assemblage, sculpture, british artist, installation

20:22, 2022, plaster aluminium, acrylic, 102 x 100.5 x 82cm photo: Article Studio

I cast nearly 2000 fingers, almost all mine, in the last year of my dad’s life. We had been in and out of lockdowns and proximity to others provoked a feeling of jeopardy, fear and, maybe, longing. An anthropomorphic mass, the work speaks of space and touch, sensitive membranes and the ability to ‘know’ that finger tips possess.

Bed, 2024-2026, woollen blankets and metal, 30cm x 30cm : 90cm / 1.2m / 1.35m / 1.5m / 1.8m

I had an altered relationship with my father in the final years of his life as he grew frail and disorientated with Alzheimers. We spent a lot of time in his bedroom, which I never would have done before, talking about strange and interesting things, his mind had become more receptive to ideas and conversations that he would have dismissed in the past. The blankets are suffused with sweat, tears, love and comfort, they have warmed people and protected furniture. They are soft, itchy, stained and woven in colours of memory.