I am a multi-disciplinary artist working across textiles, photography, digital collage and installation. My practice follows dehumanisation, polarisation and othering — how institutions and society decide who belongs and who doesn't. I use the slow repetition of sewing to bring care to appropriated imagery. This juxtaposes with the cutting of collage, highlighting the complex feelings mothers carry — the lioness protects with both power and destruction. Through material and touch, I want to return humanity to people who have been reduced to images. The work is, of course, about myself and my own experiences, but I am looking through the lens of a mother living with a global perspective, back at history and hesitant of the future.

I make environments that become activated and encountered by the public. Work is built to be explored multi-sensorially — our eyes are not the only way we experience and feel. I borrow the aesthetics of official, bureaucratic spaces and fill them with tenderness instead. I want to invite questions that may be uncomfortable, but necessary. I believe art has the power and importance to disrupt and shift narratives, in the hope to catch even a small change in thinking.

My work sits within a wider moment in contemporary art where textiles are being taken seriously as a political language, and where care itself is a radical position. My influences range from Alfredo Jaar, Lubaina Himid, Faith Ringgold and Pedro Reyes to Bisa Butler, René Matić and Richard Mosse, along with academics Lina Khatib, Mohammed El-Kurd and Julia Bryan-Wilson.

"The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe." — James Baldwin, 'Notes on the House of Bondage', 1980