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

I made this painting recently, and while looking at it again I realised how bodily it felt — almost womb-like. Womanhood in colour and movement. Perhaps the body sometimes knows before the mind does. Art that comes from the body often reaches back into it. That’s not weakness — that’s where its power is. This painting began as a physical act. I covered a previous canvas with white acrylic, a painting I had been stuck on and unhappy with for months. Over that blank surface I b