BROKEN

Content note: This post discusses violence against women, femicide and tech-enabled abuse. No suicide content.

I’ve been working on this for weeks. I finished it on Monday 15th June 2026. The same day the government finally did something.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think when you’re paying attention, you make the thing at the right moment. You don’t always know why you’re making it until it’s done.

BROKEN is a painted iPhone home screen on canvas, 45 by 34 centimetres, housed in a gold gilt frame. The screen is cracked. Real glass, smashed from the inside out. The crack radiates from one icon at the centre: Life360. A family safety app. Used by 50 million people, most of them women, to share their live location at all times because the world isn’t safe enough not to. That’s not a feature. That’s an adaptation to threat. And it sits at the dead centre of this piece, because it belongs there.

Surrounding it are the apps. TikTok. Instagram. Snapchat. Facebook. YouTube. X. WhatsApp. Telegram. Reddit. Twitch. Spotify. Roblox. Fortnite. Kick. The ones that teach and the ones that track and the ones that do both. A phone screen that looks like every phone screen. A phone screen that’s already in our pockets, or our children’s.

The time on the status bar reads 1997. That’s when SixDegrees launched, often credited as the first social media platform. I froze the clock there, at the moment it started. Twenty-nine years of this, and here we are. A blood trail running from the Life360 icon down the full length of the screen, pooling at the dock. A handprint on the glass. The blood on the frame itself, spread beyond the edge, because it always does.

The piece is dedicated on the back, in red Posca, to Hollie Gazzard. 1994 to 2014. Murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Her abuse started with constant texts and phone calls to her mobile. The phone was part of the weapon from the very beginning. Her name is on the back of this because it was always about her, and it was always about the phone.

I started making this after I finished a previous piece about boys and girls, built from activity books published in 2008. Those books from the charity shop, 20p each, telling children who to be. Girls: how to be prettier. Boys: how to fight a bull. I initially thought they were published in the 1950s, but no. 2006 and 2008. I stood there in the aisle, pretty shocked, and saw the whole thing as art. And when I was done with that piece, I started to think about what replaced the books. The answer was obvious and enormous and already in everyone’s hand.

The phone replaced the book. The same lessons, delivered faster, at scale, with a feedback loop, directly to a child’s face, a hundred times a day, without any of us being able to see it happening.

That’s what this piece is. It’s the book. But it’s 2026, not 1958. The icon in the centre isn’t Instagram or TikTok. It’s Life360. Because she still needs an app to tell someone where she is at all times, just in case. The boys are being taught what they’re owed. The girls are being tracked so they survive collecting the debt.

And then on Monday the Prime Minister stood up and announced a ban on under-sixteens using social media. TikTok. Instagram. Snapchat. YouTube. Facebook. X. Reddit. Threads. Twitch. Kick.

I didn’t think they’d actually do it. Not this fast, not this wide. It goes further than Australia. There’s a night-time curfew for older teenagers. Limits on AI chatbots. Restrictions on some gaming features. 116,000 responses to the consultation, the most since equal marriage, and the majority of them, children included, said do it.

So credit where it’s due. That’s something.

But I’ll believe it when I see it enforced, not just announced. The companies will stall and wriggle the way they always do. And notice who’s not on the list. Roblox. Millions of children on it. Grooming incidents stacking up around the world. Not included, because it gets to call itself a game. That’s not an oversight. That’s a loophole, and the next harm always pours straight through.

And there’s something else this doesn’t touch. The blood on the frame in my painting. The crack in the glass. The woman who needs an app to share her location because the world isn’t safe. None of that is on the list of things the ban will fix. The ban stops a fourteen year old getting on Instagram. It doesn’t stop the thing that’s waiting for her the day she turns sixteen. It doesn’t change what’s being built in the boys around her in the meantime. An age wall isn’t the same as dismantling what’s on the other side of it.

The gold frame around a smashed phone screen says something. We treat this thing as precious. We sell it as connection and community and creativity. We put it in an ornate gilt frame. And underneath all of that: blood. Real blood. Not metaphorical blood. The actual cost of the actual harm to actual people, running down the screen, spreading beyond the edge.

None of it is enough. But a year ago, none of it was even on the table.

Hollie Gazzard was twenty years old when she was killed in the hair salon where she worked in Gloucester. Her ex-boyfriend had been stalking her by phone for months. Constant calls. Constant texts. She changed her number. He got it again. The phone was part of how he kept her afraid before he killed her.

Her family built an app in her memory to help keep women safe. And that’s the thing that sits in my chest about all of this. That the corporations who built the platforms that amplified this culture, who have the money and the engineers and the data and the reach, they built a better safety app than the one a grieving family put together with nothing but love and loss. Life360 can track fifty million people in real time. Who can compete with that? Who’s supposed to?

Her name is on the back of this piece because I want her remembered. Not as a statistic. Not as a victim category. As a twenty year old woman with a name and a life that was taken.

BROKEN is for her.

And it’s for the girls being shrunk by the same machine. And it’s for the boys being built into something they might not even want to become, fed a version of masculinity that tells them dominance is their birthright and women are the prize. They’re not born like that. The machine makes them. And then the girls are the ones who live with what it made.

This ban matters. If it works, if it’s actually enforced, the boys who’d have spent their early teens in the manosphere get a few years back. The girls who’d have spent theirs being told they’re not enough get a few years back. That’s not nothing. That is, in fact, the whole point of VAWG prevention: you stop it before it starts. You don’t wait for the harm to land and then try to repair it.

But we need a lot more than this. The algorithm is still there. The culture is still there. Roblox is still there. The men who built all of it are still there, still getting richer, still protected by the comfortable silence of everyone who’s decided it’s too complicated to be their problem.

Not one more.

BROKEN is a mixed-media original artwork, 45x34cm acrylic and found materials on canvas, real glass, gold gilt frame. A fine art giclee print of the finished smashed piece will be available in the shop shortly.

Dedicated on the verso to Hollie Gazzard, 1994 to 2014.

Too much in my head, so I write. So I paint. So I refuse to be quiet.