Paintings

Acrylic on canvas
35cm x 38cm
£260

The artwork references Billie Whitelaw’s 1973 BBC performance of Samuel Beckett’s Not I to engage with women’s voice in art and other literary and visual traditions through which the artist loosely meanders.

First exhibited in June 2025 at the Art Pavilion in Mile End, London, as part of ESOP (Essential School of Painting) Painting Matters 2 group exhibition.

Listen to the artist voice by clicking here or read below the accompanying text.

Stitching futures from fragments. Art as wound, healing, thread, and threshold.

Pause a moment, if only for a moment… (Samuel Beckett, Not I. 2009, 90)

References lying all over the body…

In my limbs, my head, in the metallic taste left in the mouth from years of academic chewing… learning, teaching, how to read, listen, critique… artworks that are not mine, yours, as if they were…

Extensions of me, of my soul searching for the true self, the one and only… unable to bend to the rules of the market, the hierarchies of power, the stamps of institutional knowledge…

700 words to say what my body knows beyond utterance… the smell of paint on a blank canvas, the symbols in which the discourse can be dis-membered, re-membered, out-figured… my academic housework amongst others…

The push and pull of the researcher’s life… the uncertainty of intellectual thrills… multifaceted ways in which theories of perception shape my woman’s body, the artist, the researcher… what do I look like? what are these sounds? automation, creation, re-imagining the self…

Where are you from? humm, seriously? where are you from?

Ha, form!… the shape of things landing on my lap… materialised expectations, frustration, alienation… interdisciplinary knowledge smashing structural cages, re-defining Cartesian ways… because the body knows… I am, what I am, as I am…

I hold a secret Malinowska doll in my hands, a multitude of identities I can peel off as I go along… again? are you uttering that word again? womb, tomb, chump! how can you think pregnancy when life is in such a precarious state? having it all, eh? how?

That book, my precious unwritten book, opened on an imaginary space… uncontained, unchained… too early for the white academic space…

Black? what do you mean by that? can you please position yourself?

700 words… time is contrived, space ringfenced. A subversive laughter erupts from far away, the delicate matter of my thoughts crumbling on the floor… I can hear my voice peaking and waning, curling and hiding… the ladder, jump on that ladder, I said!

I fall, I get up again… another step, another fall… look up, stay strong, hold tight. I am in fact… having none… not the slightest… (Ibid, 86) pleasure… you are gross!

How can I make sense?… where is sense in the patriarchal game? up the ladder? down the ladder? against the ladder? within the ladder? what? why? moaning again? can you choose the right words please? your voice… the meeting is up… your time is up!

Something is pressing against my brain… there is a bill I haven’t paid… but I can choose between milk and a tube fare… where? meeting the producer? nah… that’s naff, go back to your desk, work harder, just harder, the voice says…

A meritocratic system you must trust… surely, somehow, you’ll get there… where? meeting the Head of School? nah… that’s naff!

how she survived!… and now this stream… not catching the half of it… not the quarter… no idea… what she was saying… imagine!… no idea what she was saying!… (Beckett 2009, 89)