An old housemate once said to me “I love the way that you look at things. It’s like you are always seeing things as if you’ve just seen them for the very first time.”

The other day I was thinking about being a kid and the oscillation I experienced between the frustration of needing quick, fast changing activities, the quite literal painful experiences of boredom, and then how I’d get engrossed in certain activities uninterrupted for hours on end.

Sometimes when I’m giving a talk I share an image from years back which includes working with some of my mental health medical records. One of the images is just a list of hand scrawled names of medications prescribed to me from 2004 - 2008. A litany of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications, a medical student’s summary.

One of the clearest memories I have of speaking to a counsellor, aged 18, is describing to her how I experience my thoughts.

The final event as part of my initial public programme with Bethlem Gallery for the (be)longing project was a full day conference in South London.

For the past few years I have been repeating the same process: I sit down at my studio table with a piece of paper and a drawing implement. I draw a ‘thread’ that begins to travel across the page. I repeat the process over and over.

There is this constant and pressing reminder that I don’t have a family archive. I’m aware of it as people make comments about all the things that their families have held on to for generations, the photo albums that their parents force them to look through, or the fear of how much they’ll inherit.

The final creative workshop for my (be)longing Bethlem Gallery programme of events that I am curating was run by Dr Ngozi Oparah. Ngozi ran a fantastic storytelling workshop focusing on prompts related to our sense of belonging.

After a second gruelling 12 week wait after an application re-submission I’m so excited that my (be)longing project is now funded by Arts Council England.

For the second event for the (be)longing Bethlem Gallery programme of events that I am curating, artist Keith Clapson ran a collaborative painting workshop exploring how we navigate where we belong in relation to others.

The first event for the (be)longing Bethlem Gallery programme of events that I am curating was a creative workshop run by artist Jules Cunningham.

I Never Wanted You Anyway. There are two occasions where I can attribute these words to my father, that I can remember.

AI Prompt: Write a 15-line poem about familial estrangement using the metaphor of islands.

I have started re-working back into these images of island to create contour maps. Something that I find fascinating about contour maps is that not everything is revealed - layers are hidden and revealed based on depth of the land. If islands are bodies, of land, or in my case human bodies, I love the notion that different maps may reveal the hidden layers within us.

Sometimes I thought of the islands as bodies - not of land - but human. The liquid as emotions, sprawling out whilst simultaneously being contained and directed by myself. At times I found myself in dialogue with the work, asking what do you need? and waiting for it to direct me.

In my steadfast approach to avoid doing other less than joyful work, I found myself doing a bit of digging around this morning. Whilst I wait for my Ancestry DNA test to arrive I thought that I would see if I can get any information from Barnados, where my father was left at an orphanage in the late 1950s.