Too much in my head. So I painted. Uncontainable is a mixed media artwork about feminist rage, collective voice, and refusing to be quiet.

You know Live. Laugh. Love. You have seen it on kitchen walls and coffee mugs and cushions and cards. Handed to women as the full extent of what they are supposed to feel and want and be. Content. Quiet. Decorative. Grateful. I took that format and I put something else inside it.

I started With Shaking Hands because I could no longer contain it. The rage. The grief. The watching. The knowing. The gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be, and the feeling of standing at the edge of that gap with no bridge and no ladder and no way across…

Everyone says you look just like me.
Let me tell you what that means.
They were choosing your colour
before you had even arrived.
Here is your doll.
Here is your kitchen.
You will learn to be good…

Because I am an English woman,
and I care what happens there.
Because what they do with women’s rights
ripples through the global air.
Because in the land of the free,
they’ve locked the clinic door…

There’s a rucksack I carry.
Invisible, but heavy.
It wasn’t packed in one go,
just a slow, relentless loading.
Not days or months,
but years of collecting…

I didn’t mean to cry today
not in the cereal aisle.
Not because of war.
But I thought about my boy,
his Spiderman pyjamas,
the way he skips when he runs…

164 years ago
the world was quiet
horses on cobbles
candles in windows
hands red from scrubbing linen…

You don’t have to roar.
You don’t have to rise with fists clenched,
shoulders squared,
battle cry ready.
You don’t even have to move…

She’d just come off stage.
A matinee performance.
Still had her makeup on-
bright eyeshadow, thick lashes,
tiny diamantés stuck to her cheekbones.
She was proud…

I got a compliment last week.
“You look amazing,” she said.
I smiled, thanked her,
said it was just my hair,
washed, dried,
worn down for once…

It’s 7:44am. I’m already tired. There’s one odd sock again. Never two. Who knows where that other one goes. There’s grated cheese on the floor and a child saying, “Can I go on the iPad now?” before I’ve even finished wiping the tears from that video of a mother in Gaza digging her baby out of rubble…