BROKEN
This is what a phone screen looks like when you finally see it for what it is. BROKEN is a painted iPhone home screen, cracked open with real glass, smashed. Sixteen apps sit in the grid, the ones feeding the same poison from different directions, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, Kick, the manfluencer pipeline running straight through a teenager's pocket. At the dead centre sits Life360, a family safety app fifty million people use to track their own children and partners in real time, because the world isn't safe enough not to. The crack starts there. It radiates out from the one app built to protect, because that's exactly how it happens. The thing meant to keep her safe becomes the centre of the wound. Blood runs from it, down the screen, past the dock, onto the gold frame itself, because the damage was never going to stay neatly inside the glass. The frame is real, kept deliberately, because we treat this thing as precious. We charge it overnight on the bedside table. We hand it to a seven year old without blinking. Underneath the gilt, this is what's actually happening. The piece is dedicated on the back to Hollie Gazzard, twenty years old when she was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in 2014. Her abuse began with constant calls and texts to her phone. The phone was part of the weapon from the very beginning. The print isn't ready yet. The crack is real. Giclee print coming to the shop soon.
BROKEN. The phone as the weapon. The crack starts where the safety app sits.
Where it started. A river scene from an auction lot. Nice enough. Not mine yet. Most things I make starts as something else.
Gessoed over. Three coats and the river's gone. A blank screen waiting to become the things that harms us.
The background. The deep blue-purple of a factory-default lock screen. The colour every phone greets you with before the damage starts.
Testing the layout 1 Working out how big the icons needed to be.
Testing the layout 2. Too small and you don't clock it. I went bigger, so that you know immediately what you're looking at.
Playing with the icons on paper. First print-out, just paper, just shifting them around on the test canvas. Seeing how the colours sat together. The apps we hand our kids without thinking.
Onto card, edges cut. Printed properly on card, cut to the rounded corners, laid on the black. Starting to look like the thing in your hand right now.
Cut and laid out. The full grid taking shape. TikTok. Snap. Discord. Life360 in the middle.
Checking it against the frame. The gold gilt frame. Classical container, modern wound. Making sure it all sat right before anything got stuck.
Stuck down, glass in place. Everything fixed, the unsmashed glass laid over the top. The calm before. This is the bit that always scares me a little.
The test smash. Practising the break on spare glass first. You only get one strike on the real thing! Aim for Life360.
First pass of blood. My own hands. The print, the splatter up the frame. Not painted with a brush. Hands. Shaking.
The wound in Life360. Close up on the hole. A second, darker layer of blood coming up through it for depth. The safety app bleeding out from the middle.
BROKEN. Finished. The apps, the crack, the blood, the gold frame. Two women a week. This is what the screen has to do with it.