8. THE ISMS & THE OBIAS | Winter Sculpture Park 2025
I started this year with a beautiful opportunity. It was an honour to be selected for this year’s Winter Sculpture Park, 2025 - London’s largest independent sculpture park, created by the inimitable Gallery No.32 who are a power house duo, Kieran Idle & Meg Stuart - a curatorial collaboration born from a shared passion to create moments where art and culture can disrupt everyday life, and who speak highly of connection. View the Gallery No. 32 website here.
We recorded sound bites for visitors to listen to while visiting the park. Here’s mine:
My sculpture, made for WSP 2025, ‘Drive like a girl’ is a celebration of machinery, of perseverance and a rejection of the notion that your interests, abilities or identities can be prescribed to you via stinky old stereotypes. So, what I’m saying is that I reject the notion that the tasks, your occupations, what you find pleasure in, or what you are paid to do, can be prescribed to you, simply because you may have been born with a *pum-pum (*insert other options).
All the Isms and the Obias are so lame. Sexism, racism, ableism, transphobia, the list goes on and on and the isms and the obias are not the one.
Fork lifting and cherry picking.
It was an honour to be part of WSP, London’s largest sculpture park, the city I grew up in. Nothing happens without innovation, energy and hard graft so thank you to the Gallery No.32 team and the exhibiting artists. We must all cherish and support creativity and culture in whatever way possible because individually and community it is invaluable.
No one’s watching, do something.
These are heavy times and the world moves fast. I guess things are normal in the sense that facism, colonialism, power struggles, and maniacal governments are old dahling, but the arts are an opportunity for truth, escapism and joy.
Above: Prayer Room x WINTER SCULPTURE PARK 2025 / UNCLE campaign
I couldn’t have made or installed this sculpture without the support of my loved ones. In the depths of winter, after full-on work shifts, I would weld in an outside, temporary studio space amidst the falling light. I ordered my metal from a company Metal4u which never turned up, bought a stick welder without a plug and my housemates had to listen to hours and hours of the sewing machine on full pelt whilst I sewed and binge watched Love is Blind.
I find making art incredible, it revitalises and energises me but I think it’s important to highlight the realities of making art alongside full time work and how I am struggling to find an inside, permanent studio to weld in. Below are some photographs, in which I look exhausted and content. It’s important to highlight too, the physical making skills I have gathered over the years, the process behind fast, immediate reels on social media, and the privilege I have in being able to make art, and have the freedom to do so.
I haven’t written for a hot minute because I cannot physically make sculptures, work full time, try to live a shenanigan-filled life, write about my art and simultaneously care about the multitude of current global horrors - it’s a one way ticket to a burn out situation.
Bearing witness to a world that has aided, abetted and justified the genocide of the Palestinian people by Israel and it’s allies, for nearly 2 years is almost beyond words, but silence and denial lends itself to the perpetrators. The truth vs the occupier. A collapse of conscience in a multitude of ways, has spread far and wide all across the world, across our screens and into many peoples' dehydrated brains.
My American honey sent me a photo of an unassuming car parked outside her window yesterday, with ICE agents inside eating a hotdog. OK, I made up the hotdog, but CC: fascism. The state of the world is ?????, it’s hard not to let despair turn to apathy but keep moving, you could donate to The Sameer Project and boycott companies. The souls who have lost themselves, may one day, have to reckon with their hatred of life, of living beings, and themselves. This includes bought politicians here in The UK, police arresting peaceful protestors (I just watched a shocking video of Berlin police violently punching a protestor in her face twice), biased media and anyone who can justify one life over another. Proscription, peaceful protestors and Palestine sums up the summer of 2025.
I have found solace in voices such as comedian Jen Brister, Journalist Mona Chalabi, this beautiful writing by Naomi Shimada ‘Every Life is a universe’ and Misan Hariman’s The Purpose of Light exhibition at Hope 93 Gallery, whose ‘images are not just moments frozen in time, they are acts of witness, of remembrance, and of resistance’. Photos below:
I recently read Bernardine Evaristo’s Manifesto, On Never Giving Up. A beautiful life story of optimism and being unstoppable. Accepting that life will always chuck up obstacles and that there are knock-backs helps to build resilience and a creatively enriched life.
“The creative process for me is an experiment -trial and error - a trip into the unknown, which leads to new discoveries. ”
Meanwhile, everyone’s vaping their way down town, plumes of vanilla bubblegum billowing as their phone screen light cuts through the steam. Flicking between live-streamed genocide and bands of elastic the Kardashians are opening up their suits to sell you on the sidewalk. They wink as they gesture to your double chin, and then point to the inside lining of their opened jackets, nude shade face wraps dangling in rows like cigars. Soon the tech bros will revolutionise our biology so we no longer need to exist in physical form, just voices commanding technology so we can work work work, drive data, drive sales, and drive ourselves, mad.
Not sure how to proceed in today’s world?
Don’t stop moving to the funky funky beat.
