I’ve been trying to work out where to begin retracing this trajectory. The trouble is, the further back I look, the less convinced I am that there is a beginning.

I carry with me a somewhat tumultuous history, and that followed me through the door when I walked back into art school after my daughter was born in 2021. What comes with this history are endless layers and blurred timelines that overlap and coil back on themselves.

Just because the tapestry of my life creates an abstract image up close doesn’t mean that it has no meaning. There is. Lots. It’s just that most of that meaning seemed to have retreated into the sinews, nerves, muscle memory and fibres of my being.

I didn’t have the words.

That’s what they say about trauma. Sometimes an experience overwhelms our ability to process it as it happens. But just because something couldn’t be processed then doesn’t mean it wasn’t stored somewhere.

The body…

When I returned to art school, I quickly realised how difficult it was to remove context and self from the act of making. Whatever I made, there I was. My experiences, memories, the things I understood and those I didn’t yet have words for seemed to find their way into the work regardless.

Perhaps what I didn’t understand then was that making was becoming a way of processing through the body what I couldn’t yet articulate in words. The actions, materials and repetitions weren’t simply illustrating an experience after it had happened; they were part of the process of trying to understand it.

And what remained afterwards was, in some way, a record.

Let Me Make Myself Pretty for You, 2022
Single-channel video, 2 min 8 sec

Let Me Make Myself Pretty for You… was a short film I made in response to a brief titled Extension to the Body. At the time, I approached the brief through the idea that the mind was an extension of the body. I was interested in the possibility that what we think and understand might not exist separately from bodily experience, but emerge through it.

The title was deliberately ironic. In the film, I perform a ritual of making myself ‘pretty’, responding to internalised ideals of beauty and the anxiety of performing femininity — of being in a constant state of self-surveillance. As the ritual continues, however, I wrap Sellotape around my face. Rather than becoming increasingly ‘pretty’, the image becomes distorted, almost monstrous.

Looking back, what interests me now is the gap between what I thought I was doing and what the work seems to reveal. I began with the idea of the mind as an extension of the body, but I don’t think I yet understood the implications of that. I made the work before I fully understood it. The action came first; some of the understanding followed afterwards.

And perhaps this is one of the earliest places I can recognise something I am still trying to articulate: making as a form of embodied processing, with the work that remains carrying a trace of that process.

Looking through the work that followed, this wasn’t an isolated occurrence. The body kept returning — sometimes deliberately, sometimes before I really understood why. Different works began to circle around similar questions: what the body knows, what it carries, and what might become visible through making that cannot so easily be articulated in words.

Hold Space, 2024
Multimedia installation, Bridewell Studios, Liverpool

In 2024 I made Hold Space, a multimedia installation exploring the intermediate area of experience between mother and child. I was thinking about the relational space that exists between two people: where the boundaries of one body and another begin to blur, and where something might be held between them.

Looking back now, I can also see Hold Space as a way of processing my own position between mother and child. I had become a mother myself, while still carrying the experience of being somebody’s daughter. The work was not explicitly autobiographical, but neither was I outside of it. My relationship with my own mother, my experience of becoming a mother, and the bodily knowledge of both seemed to find their way into the work.

I think what I can recognise now is a shift taking place — from an interest in the body as a subject towards an understanding of the body as a site through which experience is known, carried and transformed.

Un/body, 2025
Multimedia installation, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool

This became more explicit in Un/body (2025), a multimedia installation in which I explored intergenerational transmission through my maternal genealogy. I wanted to uncover what I felt I might have inherited—experiences, patterns, and histories that seemed to exist within, or be carried by, the body.

As part of the installation, I created moulds resembling nipples and used them repeatedly to produce latex forms. The repetition became important in itself. The act of making the same bodily form again and again became a space for processing something that was felt by the body but wasn’t necessarily available to me through language.

The installation also included a soundscape made from recordings of women in my maternal family responding to a series of questions I had given them. Their voices brought other experiences and memories into the work, placing my own embodied experience within a wider maternal lineage.

Looking back, I can see the body becoming more than something I was representing. It began to function as a kind of archive—somewhere experience could be carried, repeated, and transformed through making.