There is something strangely disorienting about seeing your work in print for the first time. Not on a screen, not in a draft folder, not in a Google Doc you can endlessly adjust — but fixed. Held. Circulating in the world without you. My recent feature on Nikita Gill, published in The Big Issue (Edition 759), began as a conversation about myth and girlhood. But somewhere in the process, it became something else — a reflection on voice, on who gets to speak, and what it means

This interview began as a commissioned catalogue text for CAVES Gallery at Melbourne Art Fair 2026. The version published here extends beyond those initial parameters, shaped by a studio visit, a sustained conversation with the artist, and photographs I took within her workspace. When I first spoke with Mira about her new works, she returned to the figure of Demeter — the mythic mother who moves between anguish and recognition, sensing her daughter’s passage between worlds. T