Women Celebrating Women

by resident writer and artist Michaela Hall

If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that we all need to come together and celebrate each other. So, in international women’s month- it seems fitting and necessary to acknowledge those female artists who make sure to shine a spotlight on other women in their work whilst also campaigning for and celebrating the sustained success of feminism and equality.

One of the most iconic pieces of work to demonstrate these ideas is Judy Chicago's 'Dinner Party’ (1979).Renowned for her feminist teachings, activism, and the examination of the woman’s role in history, Chicago is a key figure in the field of arts education and thrives to celebrate women’s contributions to history. ‘Dinner Party’ is a large-scale installation comprising of a triangular table with thirty-nine dramatic and elaborate place settings personalised to represent thirty-nine famous women in myth and history such as Georgia O Keefe and Virginia Woolf. Each of the places included a hand-painted china plate that resembled a vulva form, styled in ways appropriate to each woman. This confrontational approach to representing the raw female form and celebrating it in a way that is ornate along with the represented presence of these powerful women was Chicago’s attempt to “end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record.” This celebration creates a visual network of female power and influence that cannot be ignored or disputed.

English Painter, Roxana Halls takes a similar approach to Chicago, in celebrating women in their vast difference and multiple forms and representations. Halls challenges the traditional ideals of the beautiful female portrait subject by creating bright, eye-catching, playful compositions that depict women participating in a range of everyday happenings that would not be traditionally considered as a subject for a portrait, such as eating sushi or visiting the cinema. The women in Hall’s paintings are loud, vibrant, and empowered. Despite, the playful approach that Halls takes, these works give a nod to the ongoing intense explorations around the female identity and perceptions of women from how they are depicted in art history while managing to maintain a celebratory core.

What both Chicago and Halls do, which is so very important, is to uphold the conversations around what it is to be female and the role a woman plays in society. However, the way in which they do this is by creating a visual statement of empowerment and pride. Both artist's work radiate confidence and self-assurance yet aren't confrontational in any negative sense and are in fact, inviting to the viewer in that they encourage women to celebrate women- no matter what. When we look at the contemporary popular culture of the world we live in today, it is easy to see how this support has translated into everyday media and activity ranging from polar opposite extremes from, for example, the loose women panel show on ITV that focuses on discussions around women’s issues all the way to the marches that take place in our cities campaigning for female equality and the closing of the gender gap. Women are celebrating women, with rigour and energy and in turn, the society we live in is changing as we know it- certainly something to celebrate in international women's month.

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Article/Essay Title

The strike of Polish women: the strength of the hanger.

Artist name

Weronika

Contact email

wrnkczachor@gmail.com

Bio From childhood, I was fascinated by art! I tried to become an artist, but I realised that it was not my mission as I got older. Now I am focusing on promoting art and organising exhibitions. I hope in the future I will be able to help artists in their careers.

The current political situation in Poland gives artists a lot of opportunities to be active. October brought a government decision regarding legal abortion. Until then, the woman had the right to abort the fetus if it was at risk of disease, death, if the pregnancy threatened the woman's life and health and if it resulted from rape. Polish women had already come out to protest earlier to have full access to abortion, but they ended up without any results. There is no doubt, the last decision attacked their freedoms and rights. Moreover, the ruling party passed this law using the institution it had manipulated - the Constitutional Tribunal. Although this law has been in force for years, the judges found it unconstitutional. This means that the woman is at risk of death, severe complications, and the knowledge that she will raise a disabled child or give birth to a dead child. This situation will also increase the number of illegal adoptions, which can have a tragic impact on women's lives.

Of course, the situation caused a bustle among Polish society. Many women began to protest to defend their rights.  Various Polish artists got involved in the action, creating multiple types of graphics using different methods. The most popular motifs turned out to be those presented for several years by the striking women in Poland, i.e. the black umbrella and the red lightning bolt. The black umbrella appeared in 2016 when the women organized a march called Black Monday. Dressed in black, they marched through the cities, and because it was rainy, all of them had umbrellas. In turn, red lightning designed by graphic artist Ola Jasionowska, according to her, it is a universal symbol warning against some force. In this case, it can be said that against the strength of the demonstrating women. This symbol has aroused many controversies, especially among people supporting the government, considering that it resembles the sign of the Nazi SS.

This year, the Women's Strike, despite the symbols mentioned earlier, also began to use the international symbol of people who fight for abortion, i.e. the hanger. This refers to illegal abortions, which are mostly done with a hanger and result in the fetus's death and the woman's. This year there are also many references to the book "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood. Protesters used the costumes of women who, after all, rights were deprived, became sex slaves, and had to wear white caps and red cloaks. I noticed that this motif appeared on many posters and signs, and I must admit that it is the most effective symbol right after the hanger. The women's story in this novel is terrifying, but the colours of the clothes themselves have a lot in common with the Polish flag's colours - white and red. These symbols were practically everywhere, on every street, on every window, even on cars. I also saw them on social media, and even my foreign friends used them to support Polish women.

Influencers and magazines addressed directly to women also took care of supporting striking women. I know influencers don't have much in common with art, but the way some of them acted made me almost lose my faith in humanity. And we have to remember that these are the people with the most vital voice. I remember one person used the women's strike to advertise the candy bars, saying they helped her deal with this challenging situation. How ridiculous is that? What is the reason for such behaviour? Why doesn't this person just use demonstration symbols and say outright that he supports women? Since they do not want to express their opinion directly, what is the purpose of referring to it? One magazine had a very similar approach, which, despite its good intentions, did not do very well. Particularly, the fashion item referred directly to the marches and protests by advertising "needed" things to take to the streets. However, most of these items are very expensive and are not suitable for demonstrations that sometimes ended with police intervention. Is this what today's capitalist world looks like?

To conclude my thoughts, I would like to say that I am very proud of women, especially artists, who have intelligently used symbols related to abortion and previous strikes. Has it been useful? Indeed, the Polish issue was discussed by foreign websites and magazines, and a lot of the works were used on social media to explain the situation in Poland. Unfortunately, the democratic Polish government did not take the majority of women's voices into account, and at the end of January, this law was officially approved as legal.

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The paradox of feminism and the Home

Jenna Fox,  Feb 2021

Bourgeois, Louise, Femme-Maison, (1947), ink on paper, 9-15/16 x 7-1/8 in., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

While researching Chicago, Whiteread, and Bourgeois’ work it uncovered how they used the home in their work and touched on feminism either obviously or subtly.  Judy Chicago, a self-proclaimed feminist and champion of women, uses craft materials associated with the home and women makers. Her home was her studio and she rallied for gallery acceptance (typically a male domain). Rachel Whiteread used home to create House as, artist, architect, and maker using man-made materials turning it into a brutalist edifice while exposing the internal structure. But was this a feminist reaction or is she an accidental feminist?[1]  While she has stated publicly, she is a socialist, she has not been as vocal about feminism.  Louise Bourgeois used her home as her studio and materials from the home for her art. Her work explores domestic suppression and she is identified as a feminist who expressly pathed the way for women artists. While female artists have used the home as a vehicle to rally against as connected to domesticity and suppression, the home also provides safe spaces, to combine work, family, and creation. It’s a paradox that I wished to explore.

Tracey Emin is an example of an artist that uses the home in multiple ways. My Bed was a rejection of home and shocking as it was made by a woman creating work on men’s terms – including body fluids, a way of both marking and soiling a special place where she had connected with another human. This ties back to Judy Chicago who had used tampons in previous works as a way of regaining “control over representations of women”.[2] It’s confessional and a snapshot in time.

Emin has consistently used the home throughout her practice, as a bedrock. Her grandmother’s chair, home simulacra using sheds, her tent, and her recent stitched wool on calico drawings. Rallying against much, confessional, she uses the comfort of the home as practice making a feminist statement as she places herself in the male arena, using typically female materials, female subjects into the male environs and with no apologies.

Emin was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy in 2011; with Fiona Rae, she is one of only two female professors since the Academy was founded in 1768 which in itself is significant for women.

But, is she a feminist artist or a woman using the home theme as a comforter to fit around her as she confesses? She’s a trailblazer for women pivotally going head to head against male artists in an unapologetic way. It is this brashness rather than the thematic recurrence of the home that nods at feminism.[3] She makes no apologies for being a female artist and as her work is egocentric the audience is left in no doubt that it’s about her. But, if all her “self” references were removed, I think her work could only be that of a woman and this is liberating. Her bed was her haven and it’s from this she created the work in the first place taking it into the historically male gallery space. It represents sleep, sex, birth, and death.  Male artists have used the bed in their work historically (Van Gough and Rauschenberg) but it’s how Emin has used it. Reflecting the YBA ethos it has a laddish-ness. Is this to fit in with male artists or make her mark as a feminist?

I ponder her intent? Is it feminist or a pathway to reject, shock, and use her work as therapy – a rejection of home and childhood as a liberator? Her frankness and revelations (physical and mental) are seen by others as feministic. She “walks the talk”, is successful on her own terms, and has been investing in property in Margate her hometown. But has this been achieved for her rather than on a mission of sisterhood and trailblazer for women artists? Or is she categorised as a feminist as a way of marginalising her work?

The connection to home is complex and reflects back at the owner a sense of pride and identity, but is also indicative of the mental self. The home is a mirror to self as explored by Clare Cooper Marcus “it became apparent that people consciously and unconsciously use their home environment to express something of themselves”.[4] Furthermore, Jung had dreams where he was walking through a house, deeper and deeper. Thus, the house can be a metaphor. Jung explains his dream “the house was a symbol of psyche or psychology” and this use of a metaphor is used by Emin, with My Bed showing her work on any terms as a woman and the bed (her home and haven) is her way of rejecting the home and by Bourgeois with her Red Room. [5]

[1] Lord, M.G. (2012) “The accidental Feminist”, Bloomsbury, USA. Lord explores how Elizbeth Taylor’s life can be read as a feminist role model through her film roles. Lord projects a Feminist role onto her.

[2] Racz, Imogen (2015) “Art and the Home”, London, I.B. Tauris and Co. p. 148.

[3] Male artists are still dominant financially. Women are marginal in this list https://magazine.artland.com/30-popular-contemporary-artists/ by sale only 10% are women. [Accessed 2/5/2020],

[4] Cooper Marcus, Clare (2006) House as a Mirror of Self, USA: Nicholas-Hay, Inc, p.7.

[5] Jung, C. G. (1989) Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaffé Translated from The German By Richard and Clara Winston, Vintage Books, London, p.182.

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Inside Out/Outside In by Rosie Gunn

Alexandra Weiss’s erotic compendium, A Woman’s Right to Pleasure, was published late in 2020 https://www.blackbookpresents.com/products/a-womans-right-to-pleasure and an accompanying podcast has just launched https://awomansrighttopleasure.libsyn.com/

I haven’t seen the book yet as it retails for over $75 but the first edition apparently sold out in weeks. What piqued my interest was that in a book dedicated to the erotic female gaze, there are few images of men and the idea that “women get off on looking at other women: what turns women on is being desired” (Marilyn Minter – Guardian, 3rd March 2021) seems to prevail. Perhaps this is no real surprise given that in the age of the selfie’ women are continually (re)presenting themselves on Instagram and TikTok and turning the camera on our own bodies seems to have become second nature, even an obsessive pastime for many young women.

 In 1994, William P Ewings’ book ‘The Body’ presented photographs in 12 chapters including ‘Eros – the body as an object of sexual desire’ in which not one image is credited to a female photographer. Yet in the chapter titled ‘Politic: the body as a site of contested meaning and value’ over half are by women as a critique of the representation of women and depict women’s bodies. It has been of utmost importance to reclaim our own bodies and articulate the gaps in feminine experience. If we go back another decade to 1985 - Sarah Kent had already suggested a female gaze at a male body ‘…would be highly subversive since it would encourage them (women) to identify their sexual proclivities beyond the parameters of masculine requirements and projections… It would mean acknowledging women as fully sexed adults and offering them sexual autonomy – an idea perhaps still too threatening not only for men but also for many women’ (Women’s Images of Men – Rivers Oram Press/Pandora).

 As a graduate and continuing through my MA into the mid-1990s, my photographic/video practice attempted to find a visual articulation of female pleasure with an active female gaze at an eroticised ‘other’.  At the time it seemed that a woman making an image of a man completely disrupted the socialised relationships of looking. When working with a model I had to watch him, but also watch myself being watched by him. Did my work contain observations that men would prefer to suppress? Linda Williams asks “Is it possible to represent the penis so it is not also the phallus; that is so that the penis is not asserted as the standard and measure to all desire.’ (Hard Core 1990). My work (mostly photography at this point) was usually measured against a masculine norm and was often misunderstood because my aims and goals probably differed from the male tradition, but it was certainly empowering through the ongoing process of making and looking at images, creating new texts and discourses, transgressing boundaries, exploring and playing with the dynamics between the artist and model as well as the artist and viewer.

 Elizabeth Grosz used the model of the Mobius Strip to provide a metaphor for the ‘uncontrollable drift of the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside’ (Volatile Bodies 1994) and thus called into question the preoccupation of many philosophers and theorists in terms of surface inscriptions and transformations of the subject’s body to explain depth and interior. She suggested that if artists and feminists could reinscription these same bodies in new ways, a possible transformation could be possible in terms that may grant women the capacity for independence and autonomy which thus far have been attributed only to men’. Male bodies seemed to have sealed themselves off as an impermeable body but as Grosz suggested, heterosexual men should be more willing to take on passive positions - to explore the rest of their bodies – and then perhaps they could reclaim, reuse, and reintensify zones and functions that have been phallically disinvested. Martin Pumphrey (Why Do Cowboys Wear Hats in the Bath? 1989) discussed how in Westerns the cowboy hero took a bath with his hat firmly in place (and maybe even smoking a cigar) to deny any suspicion of homoeroticism and to confirm his conventional masculinity. Unless male impermeability could be dissolved it seemed likely that heterosexual female desires would always be controlled, repressed, and unsatisfied.

 With my colleagues at Exposures, I ran the Women Photo Men workshop in the first half of the 90s. In three sessions we’d begin by looking at and discussing images of male nudes – from proudly striding statues in city squares through to the sensitive photographic self-portraiture of John Coplans. Then we’d have what often started as a rather nervous studio shoot with a male model but would become fun and bolder as the session progressed. A week or so later we’d meet to review our images and what became very clear is that the process of making the images was often more viscerally engaging and exciting for us than the resulting images.  Dani Lessnau uses her vagina as a camera shutter to make blurry portraits of men that are included in the new book. “I was trying to photograph a relationship I had in a normal way and it felt flat. It didn’t feel like my perspective. I encountered Ann Hamilton’s work – she put pinhole cameras in her mouth. It hit me that if she can put it in her mouth …” “Sometimes the shoots were sexual and sometimes they weren’t,” she says. “But there was always a lot of desire. The men in the series all responded differently – some saw it as fun, freeing. There were always interesting conversations.” (Guardian, Wed 3rd March 2021) In the same article, Betty Tompkins (whose Fuck Paintings are inspired by her husband’s porn stash) discusses the conservatism of the art market and notes that “one in a while, a younger female artist would embrace the subject of sex. And they would do it until they were just a little bit known. They branched out, every one of them because it’s not really acceptable as a subject.”

 My interest in video art and installation and its links with performance art and the human body grew around this time and I had ambitions to explore female desire with moving image.  But in 1997 I became the mother of a gorgeous baby boy. I took up a position in Higher Education and struggled to reconcile my practice with the strange alien male body that I now had in my charge and spent a number of years artistically conflicted. Now my research and creative interest are in screen dance/dance film as a specific genre-related to experimental film and its possibility of presenting a liberated body that can transgress the male gaze, disrupt the mainstream and allow marginalised voices to be heard. I can draw deep connections between my old work and my current trajectory and I continue to challenge and support students in their interests to develop an active female gaze.

 By: Rosie Gunn

Instagram: @gunnrosie @film.digital.art

Bio: As Course Leader Rosie Gunn established a distinct identity for the Film & Digital Art BA at UCA, grew recruitment, and forged a community between current students and alumni. Now as a visiting lecturer she focuses on research as an independent academic, artist, and activist on climate change. Her art practice includes photography and moving images on a single screen, multiscreen, and projected works. Rosie Gunn works with photography and moving images for a single screen, multi-screen, projection, and print. In 2017 her artwork ‘Chain of Resistance’ was carried in the recreation of a protest march as part of the Gestures of Resistance exhibition curated by Jean Wainwright at Romantso Cultural Centre, Athens, Greece. https://www.uca.ac.uk/staff-profiles/rosie-gunn/

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Birthing a fire of words: the journey to stoking the creative fire within
by Sabrina Richmond

I think of all my creative pursuits as embryos at various stages of gestation. My creative embryos. Like a woman carrying an embryo in her womb, she has to eat well, sleep well whilst getting about her day. One of the differences between some of my creative embryos and the ideal 9-month period for human gestation (we know human babies have survived pre-term births) is that it is not always clear the time frame required to reach full gestation. And unlike expectant mothers, I hope, they don’t go about cursing the fetus for not growing fast enough or making it clear what kind of person they are going to be when they emerge. Often, the term of a creative project is dictated by a sequence of deadlines because of that it can be challenging to focus purely on the gestation, stuff gets rushed along. Expectant mothers prepare by buying clothes, they read books, they talk to the being inside them waiting to welcome them to the world with excitement. So, I remain alarmed at how often as artists we don’t embrace the natural growth and flow of anything we are working on. How we have all too often only assigned excitement to the end and not the process. As if the end product is the thing.

When your writing flow is the result of your healing, this process has to be taken care of, that is what I am passionate about.

Now set aside if you are attached to a program needing to see work as you find it to critique it, often at odds with your readiness for the stage of development it is at. I am looking purely at the I have a story I want to tell in whatever form. I am talking about the language used and thoughts in our heads as the work even dares to grow.

I often hear emerging writers saying of their work It is rubbish, I don’t know what I am doing. Genuinely I am not about that at all. I find it harmful. I am allergic to any framework that calls for a need to berate your exploration. We can critique our work’s development without ragging on ourselves. I am also not on board with this stereotype of writers as wallflowers who would rather die than speak about their work. Some maybe are if asked to talk about self. But I haven’t met a writer who is not endlessly fascinated by how a thing comes together, the themes of a work. And isn’t it a fact that being able to talk about your work is a skill required of the profession so I would like to see an end to that wallflower assumption? But I detract.

Just like an expectant Mother doesn’t curse a child for not growing fast enough. It takes the time it takes to grow your creative embryo. Don’t get me wrong, I have seen an expectant mother 2 weeks overdue in hot weather cursing for the baby to come out. And that I can relate to when it comes to writing when you just need to get the words out. But all the thinking and reading and talking en route to writing that first line of dialogue or sentence is a valuable part of the gestation period. I genuinely cannot do the write a bit everyday advice, I will be challenging myself with a project using this method in August so let you know how it goes. I am a slow burn or churn kind of writer, I think, write little notes in my notebooks and record voice notes (inevitably the notebook will not be with me when something makes sense on a walk for example). I am not about staring at a blank page, I find it a waste of my energy, deflating actually, just another way of saying it comes from the air. It’s why we fear it, yet I think it’s just your baby isn’t ready. I am sure successful published authors are raising eyebrows now but I am talking about nurturing where your writing comes from, a thing that I truly believe comes from understanding you better. I am about creating a conducive environment for myself to continue work.

As a theatremaker, I recently began a course about understanding how neurodivergent brains approach work because I think it is essential to train oneself how to create a conducive environment for all brains in the rehearsal room and working with new writing as a director. I have found validation where I wasn’t even aware I was searching at first. The facilitator Morgan Noll spoke about how for a neurodivergent brain once a task is set until it is complete, it can feel like a failure until that moment of completion. Which only enables building the wall of awful a term Brendan Mahan uses to express the obstacles that can build up to form the collection of experiences forming a monumental barrier between you and writing.

I lived through the 2008 recession. I didn’t just lose full-time stable employment but the possibilities that erode the longer you are out of such a setup, I lost myself too. The biggest consequence of that was an inability to write for 5 years, not a diary entry let alone creative writing. We invest much of our self-esteem in the work we do, I did do. Of course, we do, we spend the majority of our time at work. The first question you’re asked when you meet someone is, what do you do?

What I know now isn’t that I couldn’t write, it was that I thought I could just get on with it. That the years of unemployment bomb that detonated leaving me to shell shocked and shrinking with loss of financial independence, every job rejection - should not have affected my writing in any way. I know now, there isn’t writer’s block, there’s an interruption of your flow because of what life has knocked you off.

This is why I found the early weeks of the covid catastrophe (in that we have seen what could have been easily avoidable deaths with early action) hard to understand, not just because we moved our often hostile and violent way of communicating with each other in the real world, all that stress online. Tweets circulating on how King Lear was written during Shakespeare’s quarantine and that we can use this time to learn to bake banana bread. And as we seem to enjoy doing, we argued on platforms whether or not to be creative. Judged people for being able to write and not being able to write during this time.

I found it hard to concentrate at first. A deadline for the first draft of a play was due, I was mentally and emotionally exhausted. Looking at emails that still needed answering was draining. I took solace in watching series streaming or on the telly. And because I do in fact enjoy cooking, and perhaps more so for what food does to connect me to my heritage, nostalgia for childhood safety, what seems like simpler times, and the basic action of feeding oneself as an act of saying I give a damn about this body, I cooked. I watched some food porn and practiced a few recipes. Looking back at those early weeks now, I realise how floaty I was and how having a task of making something I didn’t before or returning to an abandoned recipe provided safety.

I ate and slept and watched and walked. 2 weeks later, having to admit that I was antsy about the future. Which in itself was funny, as a freelancer in a largely deregulated, unequal business, I have not known what the future holds at any point pre-covid so it just felt like a house of cards falling. Did you ever do that as a kid? Spend hours lining up a deck of cards and carefully building card towers and then in a moment, tip one and watch the rest collapse in a sequence.

See the 2008 financial crisis left a residue, call it immunity but I will tell you for a long time I called it baptism by fire. It is one of the reasons I had the luxury to ask myself, what did you learn the last time things collapsed? What caused me the most pain?  It was holding on to something that had already moved on. That caused me the most pain. It was shouting to the world I put myself through uni for 3 years, have a postgrad degree, and worked for 10 years, now there’s nowhere to make a living?! What caused the greatest pain was the refusal to accept what had happened.

Like many millions of freelancers across the country and indeed the globe, I lost income instantly from the collapse of jobs lined up for the months ahead. The contract job I was in at the start of the collapse let many of us go without fulfilling the total pay. 

I did however have a roof over my head in a household still receiving an income so staying at home to save my own life wasn’t a big ask. Besides as an immigrant, I already learned how to grow my relationships online because I live oceans apart from loved ones. Had birthdays online already. What is new, thank you zoom, is watch parties which weren’t possible before zoom. I have sometimes lived in neighborhoods where dog shit was left on my doorstep so I already understand isolation.

As an artist in the performing arts beginning as a second career, after 3 years of hard graft, painful encounters with bad practice, unpaid gigs as the standard, and being othered more for being a black immigrant and in other spaces for being a woman daring to be present in life after 35-years-old in a world dominated by white, young women’s feminism doing poorly at making it intersectional, I was going to have a reading of second play staged, I was completing another and just been awarded to begin on an artist development scheme. Some development has continued digitally and now we are asking so we build the work, where and how do we share it to make a living?

The inevitable question has come to the fore, why do I create? It’s as hard to answer that as asking why do we love the people we love. It is far easier to say what you love about a person.

I can tell you something, creating after those years of feeling lost, saved me in every way I needed to be saved at the time. I can tell you that the stories in my body refuse to leave me alone until I understand them and release them. I can tell you that I enjoy those labour pains too when I know that it is close to releasing. What I have had to learn is to love the early moments where, like a new lover you are learning that body, what makes it sing, and how it expresses joy.

It is why I am careful with the language surrounding my creations and engaging with them. Even more careful about who I go to for feedback in the early stages. I learned the hard way that not everyone great at writing is good at sharing their own process or how to give you tools to share your work. And perhaps most importantly for me as a black immigrant woman from the African continent, even some great writers will not be qualified to feedback on my work because they have never read work from the continent. Because there is a cultural context they have not learned so would fail to understand why I write how I write.

Back to the course on neurodivergent brains, in the list of actions to serve as the antidote to the wall of awful, my inner smile was touched by the idea of transition activities because starting anything can feel monumental. An example of a transition activity is maybe before you begin writing you watch 15 minutes of anime. And at the end of that day when you tick off achievements adding the transition activities is key because they aid you in getting to your work.

I was always carrot never stick, so this spoke to me. Even as a learner I responded to the thing that didn’t start with how-you-as-a-person-thinks-is-wrong. There were teachers who were there to threaten you to learn to pass a test and some who inspire you to understand what you are learning, invite you to know where your writing comes from making it easier for you to connect and retain information.

These past few years I have been making a conscious effort to watch my language. Words I use to describe how I am feeling, what I want. We’ve all heard it by now, what we focus on grows. What we use to describe what is happening can impact the lens through which we see things. When the word lockdown emerged, my body had an instant rejection of it. I have not found a replacement but I knew, especially based on how many people lost their lives in relation to the population size, that it was the least I could do to stay home. Lockdown suggested the opposite of a life-saving quest.

Keeping rooves overheads looms in a most dire way for so many now. So, I recognise the luxury of having this conversation. I can only say the last time my life was altered I wish I found a way to preserve more of me.

But if I look at what I write like now, I also know that what has happened to me makes me the writer I am. I want to preserve that and grow.

If you’ve reached the end of this thinking I don’t think I have it. Call one person who has your back. One of my sister’s Sam and I do a thing I like to call a hope safety deposit box. When I can’t hope for me she keeps all those beautiful things about me safe somewhere to remind me. And I do the same for her. My eldest sister Michelle has been a lighthouse my whole life. A few years ago she bought us all these great diaries with a story about a person from history in them. My other sister received Frieda Kahlo whom I was obsessed with at the time. I got one about the dramatist Friedrich Schiller who wrote The Robbers, now I am yet to read this work from Germany. What struck me the day I looked at the back one day many years after I was gifted it was, my sister had seen the whole of the moon already. It is like she knew I would explore playwrighting before even I did.

You can always find me obsessing about lyrics to a song, philosopher Rumi quotes, a thing I have found or heard in a new way. If you are at a point in life where you feel alone and lost as we all do in life in that act of searching what seems like darkness, Rumi says: “Life's waters flow from darkness, Search the darkness, don't run from it.”

I am looking for new ways to understand the word darkness and change it in my language.

I am currently listening, on repeat, to a song by Peter Gabriel with Atif Aslam called Speak (Bol) which I would never have heard would it not be for the making of Mohsin Hamad’s book The Reluctant Fundamentalist into a film with the actor I should like to see as the next James Bond –
Riz Ahmed. Some lyrics from the song go:

History holds you time is blown
Say what you have to say
In a silence so strong that it makes you its own
Stand up and speak out

Wanna drag it and you are rattling inside
Say what you have to say
As so in life you can no longer hide
Say what you have to say
Abandon the fear and you bring back your pride
Stand up, speak out

In recent times we seem to have confused speaking out with the act of force, with shouting. We have argued about what is activism. How to be an activist. The journey of saving one’s own soul takes its own unique path. Some of us will make that first break from a violent silence with writing words.

BIO

 Sabrina Richmond is a writer, performer & director with a background in journalism. As Oxford Playhouse Evolve Artist 2020/21 she’s developing Devil's Doorbell a show about the right to sexual pleasure. She's a Tamasha Theatre Playwright 2019/20 alum.