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. The rest is coming.