Why Draw a Line at the Lion: Saying No to Carving a Lion as a Rejection of Empire Propaganda in My Art Practice
In the practice of making, the decision of what not to depict can carry as much power as what is rendered. For me, saying no to carving a lion was my defiant refusal of empire’s enduring control over art education. The lion, long used in Western heraldry, coats of arms, and colonial symbolism, stands as an emblem of dominance, conquest, and unyielding strength. To replicate its form risks reinforcing a visual language historically used to uphold empire and suppress alternative narratives.
The lion’s symbolism, especially in British colonial contexts, is inseparable from its use as a tool of imperial propaganda. It appears guarding institutions, etched into currency, statues, and school insignias—a reminder of who was meant to rule and who was meant to obey. When an artist reproduces such symbols—let me be clear—by saying, to make without interrogation, even for educational reasons, it perpetuates the systems these icons represent.
In my diasporic, decolonial art practice rooted in expanded drawing, rejecting the lion is a way of carving space—literally and conceptually—for other stories to emerge.
This refusal is also an act of material ethics. In choosing not to carve a lion, I resist the seductive draw of power embedded in its form. There is a deep temptation to co-opt imperial symbols in order to critique or subvert them, but I question whether replication—even when ironic—truly distances the work from the lion’s original context. For me, the lion is not a blank canvas. It is already heavy with centuries of domination. To reproduce it, even with critique in mind, risks reactivating the very structures I aim to dismantle.
Furthermore, when entering a carving workshop designed for artists, it is crucial that I bring my own designs—not only as a declaration of artistic agency, but as a way to interrupt the silent hierarchies often embedded in craft spaces. These workshops, while collaborative and skill-based, can unconsciously perpetuate a canon of acceptable motifs, often leaning toward Western or masculine iconographies, such as the lion. By introducing my own designs—rooted in ancestral knowledge, personal symbology, and diasporic memory—I challenge the implicit expectation to replicate dominant forms. This act reclaims the space of making as one of cultural authorship rather than technical reproduction. Bringing my own designs asserts that my imagination, shaped by both Indigenous and contemporary feminist thought, is worthy of carving into permanence. It transforms the workshop from a site of mimicry into a site of resistance and invention—where the act of making becomes inseparable from the politics of what is made.
To draw a line at the lion is also to draw a line in the lion—to dissect, interrupt, and make visible the assumptions carried in inherited iconography. Mine is a methodology of interruption. It is how I confront what was passed down, not to preserve it, but to challenge its hold over collective imagination. I do not carve the lion, not out of fear or reverence, but because I know its history too well.
In this rejection, I carve new ground. One not bound by empire’s myths, but open to the plural and the possible. In saying no to the lion, I say yes to a different kind of practice—one that makes space for the fragile, the forgotten, and the free.
Sitting with the Uncomfortable:
Growth, Grit and Ghosting the Patriarchy, MA Dissertation 2025
Introduction
This dissertation explores how artistic practice can function as a mode of resistance, repair and reconfiguration. From pencil to pixel, from voice to gesture, I ask: how can making become a method of unpicking dominant narratives? What does it mean to create within and against, institutions shaped by colonial, patriarchal and Eurocentric values? These questions sit at the core of my work as a Queer Mexican artist living in London, negotiating the frictions between personal history, cultural identity and the systems I move through.
This is not a traditional academic text. It is a constellation of five essays—each one an intervention—blending critical reflection, autobiography and material experimentation. Rather than presenting a linear argument, this dissertation moves with the rhythms of studio practice: layered, intuitive and interruptive. For me, making is not an outcome of research—it is the research. The studio becomes a site of excavation where histories—personal, national, gendered—are not only studied but reimagined.
Each essay traces a different strategy of interference—through myth, memory, medium, or mouth—and considers how my practice might offer new ways of seeing, feeling and understanding. Together, they circle around themes of resistance, making within hostile systems, materials as carriers of memory, joy as protest and drawing as a form of healing.
My critical model is grounded in embodied, poetic and materially-driven practices of refusal. Informed by a decolonial feminist ethos and thinkers such as Legacy Russell, Anna Tsing and Shawn Wilson, this methodology privileges intuition, memory, narrative and material entanglement as forms of research that reject extractivist academic conventions.
What follows is not a tidy set of conclusions, but a record of process and provocation. This dissertation is an archive of what I have survived, what I have questioned and what I continue to make.
The Forgiving Brush: Drawn to a Practice of Becoming
Beginning the Reclamation of Self
I am drawing. I see art as a practice of healing and reclamation (hooks, 2000). I was 47 when I started drawing, recently divorced, living in a country with no family other than my two young children.
Paper and pencil saved me. Pencils, charcoal, pens and inks; I learned of textures and papers. Layers of mediums. I was not certain of how to do any of it. This knowledge seeking gave me a purpose that was solely mine. It fed feeds my soul.
Discovery Through Material Play
I learned to live again, to move, swirl—through drawing. In the movement of the drawn images, I could also play with perspective. I pushed and pulled aspects of the drawing forwards and backwards. I discovered motion and play with the interaction of paint and charcoal.
Brushes. I used different types of brushes. I had to work with interruptions—little lives had their demands. Hence my brushes became rigid; hard, angry, neglected brushes. A neglected brush does not yield; they make me work for every mark. Choices to make—neglected child, neglected brushes. Eventually a balance. Experimentation and curiosity instead of guideline and rules about each material. Just keep drawing. Mantra becoming Manifesto.
Mixed Media and Myth-Making
Paint and charcoal like each other. Paint moves the charcoal line; smears and greyscale develops. The Atlantis to Yucatan series reflects this.
The combination of paint with my charcoal drawings created a space where the past and the future met in the underwater world of Atlantis. The energy of the charcoal and paint refuses perfection—interrupts the myth of a controlled fine art practice in favour of mess, revision and disruption.
I worked in layers of paint, pigment, drawings and painting. Navigating layers is how I live my life—when you are a woman of colour you have to navigate every space to determine safety within each space. Those skills feed my practice. I know how to work with a “no.”
Reflection Through the Eyes of Another
My work is a conversation with various versions of myself. I am all the people in each drawing, because to remain safe I have to anticipate other’s movements,; I draw with the knowledge of my lived experiences.
It reminds me of Francis Bacon’s work. His portraits capture all the emotional frequencies of a person—after hours, years of self-reflection. He achieved it in painting—through movement, through mood—while still holding onto the language of drawing. There is an understanding of structure and a trust in the viewer to navigate what is left unresolved. What Marr called “cartoonishly shocking” I see as Bacon continuing to reject what is a painted portrait. He continually mocked and scrutinised the contemporary art world (Marr, 2021).
I chose this portrait because I see a connection between us. What I recognise in his work reflects what I encounter in myself: a blend of the critical, the crude, the self-absorbed and the deeply loving. An intensity of living and feeling, Queer in a unwelcoming world.
The Artist Present
I am a practitioner who shares my process with full awareness of who I am and where I come from. I share it with the knowledge I possess; I share it for my tutors—so the I can better understand myself and my process.
For the final image, I chose one where the tip of my finger remains in the frame. A small reminder that the maker is never fully absent. A subtle layer in the ongoing story of making—the constant, imperfect act of documentation.
Lessons in Layers of Learning: Protest, Power and Practitioner
Lessons Begin In Motion
Since February, Kendrick Lamar’s, They Not Like Us, has been on repeat in my head. I found Serena dancing up there empowering. For all of us 1970s-born tomboys, with big muscled bodies she is a constant–a beacon of what woman can be. A Black woman can be a champion and a dancer and mother and own a football club. She embodied powerful grace.
Dancing Through Lineage
For those of us who remember the 2004 Olympics and her doing the same dance, it was an absolute SCREAM to see gang-walk dance on a bigger stage and no one could touch her. No fines. No cultural shaming. That Super Bowl moment was right up there with 1936 Jesse Owens winning olympic gold in front of Hitler at the 1936 Olympics and the Black Power Fist Rise of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics.
Those stories are the layers of knowledge within my practice. Layered learning is cumulative, but non-linear and interruptive—each new influence challenges what came before. All those layers of athletes and activism were moving with each step Williams made. This is what we mean when we speak of standing on our ancestors’ shoulders. It was right there to clearly see and experience and cry and laugh and just get up and dance with joy. For a moment the protest was televised around the world. While at the same time, fascists sit in the USA white house and congressional offices.
The Soundtrack of Resistance
That half-time performance and those layers of history and activism all spoke to me about the work that the global majority do every day–Lamar brought it all to the biggest stage of the USA. Lamar channeled Owens and the fascists had to sit back and see what agency and beauty look like (hooks, 1989). Living without fear is a great disruptor to the coloniser thinking. The coloniser needs us scared, keeping our head down, working and punching -in and out of our lives without a thought to time or place. How our time turns into money to feed a machine that keeps oppression leaching off us until we feed the worms.
While the Super Bowl Half-time Show is not the typical structure of art knowledge, the joy, dancing, lyrics and movement translated into empowerment and agency that inspires my art practice (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). I felt pride, in myself and all that I offer. As Legacy Russell wrote, with a disruption, what a massive glitch to the mainstream media’s typical goal of silencing us (Russell, 2020).
Building What Was Denied
There is a connection between what Lamar offered and Larry Achiampong’s first book, If it Don’t Exist, Build It. Achiampong shares several artworks he built over the last several years. When you are in the spaces of Wayfinder, or in a room with Relic, the journey is shared. The energy is connection and questioning. The disruption is to share how the making still gets done, regardless of working within a hostile environment (Achiampong et al, 2025).
The Glitch as Method
Like Lamar’s performance, Achiampong’s book reflects Russell’s Glitch manifest in its call for reimagining digital and cultural spaces outside dominant narratives (Achiampong et al, 2025). Achiampong explores themes of race, identity and speculative futures. His work advocates for world-building as resistance. His body of work is a glitch in that it disrupts conventional systems when he frames digital disobedience as liberation. Both Russell and Achiampong challenge historical erasures by highlighting the silences and gaps within dominant narratives, urging creative autonomy beyond colonial and capitalist frameworks (Russell, 2020). Achiampong’s reflections on nostalgia and world-building parallel Russell’s embrace of the digital body as a site of transformation, making both text vital interventions in contemporary discussions on identity and technology.
Unlearning the Lie
In the Lamar performance, he made reference to, “40 acres and a mule” which was the promise of the US government in 1865 when the enslaved persons of the United States were emancipated and promised a form of reparations that never came to fruition (Holland, 2013). The full order of emancipation had more details:
This layering of historical facts explains the reality of the USA today. Not because the USA has a racist fascist president for the first time; racism is the foundation of the USA. First as a group of Europeans who stole the lands of North America from indigenous persons. Then, as a group who kidnapped and enslaved persons from Africa to work and cultivate the stolen land.
Charcoal, Paint and Refusal
The USA history, like capitalism itself, is based on the exploitation of the majority of persons. That is the history that is not taught in the United Kingdom’s national curriculum. It is the same history that the US educational system is working to erase.
These are the histories I learned after leaving formal education. I find these realisations upsetting. To be lied to for so very long–to be taught these lies, not solely by the dominant class–but also by most of my teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area of the 1970s and 1980s who were women of colour. Those acts inspire me to work on the coloniser thinking that I have internalised. To ask myself the why behind my choices.
Rest as Rebellion
Who is going to do this labour of cleaning out the detritus that fills my brain with lies about why I am here? How can I create in an art institution that was never designed for me? Sometimes, when the work is so overwhelming and I feel unseen, I ask myself, “WHY am I so very tired?” Then I remember, this is so fucking hard because I am supposed to be unborn. This system, this art education institution, built in the belly of the beast of the coloniser, was created while the English ancestors were actively working to kill my ancestors.
When I remember this, I am less tired. Each charcoal stroke I make, each brushstroke, poem and monologue, I gain strength. Each day I, “ghost the patriarchy,” I win. Through these actions, I disrupt. I give voice, not just to the ancestors of mine who survived, but to all the ones killed.
What Do We Have Here?
I need a few more rest days than the other students do. I am writing this dissertation in a library where most of the books that tell the story of the victors, the coloniser and the oppressed, the winners and losers. My simply being in the space is a disruption.
This brings me to Hew Locke ’s Exhibition at the British Museum, what have we here which is a window into his relationship with that museum. Locke shares his OBE, the “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire” awarded to him in 2023. He has it there in the cabinet along with his words about what it is to be of this island, to choose to live on this island, to be woven into the fabric of the coloniser and to make and create with the tools of the coloniser (Locke et al, 2022).
I was surprised by the text within this cabinet and I was grateful to see it. Like Locke, I live here, I question, challenge and push back to have the broadest version of each story shared. Because I know that with each decade I live here I become a part of that story (Lorde, 2007). Was Audre Lorde right? Did the coloniser appropriate the paintbrush? Now, as a maker, I am building and creating with the coloniser tools–can I disrupt with oil paint? Can I glitch the coloniser thinking in my making? Is working within any portion of the contemporary art world a sell-out into the coloniser lifestyle?
Finding My Voice in the Making
These questions and many more, are exactly what I find fascinating within art. I can ask all these questions within my making and share the process of the questions. The title that Locke chose for this exhibition is the perfect insight into finding research.
What I did not know when I visited the British Museum and Locke’s exhibition, was that a few months later I would be presenting a speech on Monuments and incorporating his work into my presentation.
What do we have here? What is working here? What story was silenced here? What can I learn? What existing story does it challenge? What can I do with this knowledge? How can I put it into my art practice? Each day I work to answer these questions.
From Verse to Vessel: Materialising the River in Clay
Setting the Course: A Professional Practice Rooted in Collaboration
My decision to apply for the Transmission Residency, explained below, was based on my approach to the MA programme, to see it as a professional degree where I have a year to meet fellow artists committed to their practices. I am in a group of five artists who are equally committed to regular meetings and creating new work that addresses the thesis of the residency.
Tributaries of Thought: Locating the Lost Rivers
We chose the theme of lost and forgotten rivers. Tributaries to the Thames and Humber Rivers (Canada) have a long history of human interventions. I wanted this theme because I cycle near the Roding River; as I cycle, I see many creeks that vanish under the residential areas. It made me think of gentrification having a longer history, the impact of the wildlife lost in the building of my home along the Wanstead Flats.
Drawing Without Tools: Sounding Out an Alternative Practice
I asked myself, how could I, outside of traditional two-dimensional drawings raise awareness regarding lost and forgotten rivers? I wrote a poem and recorded it to Soundcloud. This was not typical to my practice. To draw with words.
Leave No Trace: An Ecological Ethic of Making
Through poetry, I shared my , ‘leave no trace’ perspective with the group. I considered the environmental impact of the group exhibition on the natural landscape.
I did not want to take a mud-larking approach to this project. I am concerned that my interaction with the riverbanks would negatively impact their biodiversity. The relationship between Mexican artistic traditions and the natural environment is often one of reverence and reciprocity—principles that guide my sculptural choices and ecological ethics. (Mexico Histórico, n.d.).
Fungal Resistance: Learning from Tsing’s Mushroom Worlds
I reflected on the work of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing with her book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015). Tsing’s interdisciplinary approach combines anthropology, ecology and economics, encouraging readers to rethink human-nature relationships in a world shaped by environmental and economic crises. Rather than seeing capitalist destruction as the end, she explores how new forms of life emerge in its wake.
There are parallels in the removal of organic and non-organic matter from the riverbanks and deserted riverbeds and Tsing’s story of the matsutake mushrooms. Tsing examined how life—both human and non-human—persists in the ruins of capitalism.
In replacing the word, “capitalism” with the phrase, “coloniser mentality” I make the parallel argument that mud-larking, or removal of any organic/non-organic matter from the lost or forgotten rivers is the action to avoid in making art. It is that, “this is mine” mentality I want to challenge. Simply because a thing, a person, is within your realm does not make it a possession.
Tsing used the matsutake mushroom as a lens to examine how life—both human and non-human—persists in the ruins of capitalism. She followed its journey from forests in the U.S., Japan, China and Finland to global markets, revealing the economic networks, foragers and ecological entanglements that sustain it. The book challenges the idea that capitalism is the only framework for progress, instead highlighting alternative ways of living and trading outside dominant economic structures.
Both the mushroom and the river assert their autonomy; they do not exist for human convenience, yet people seek to contain, harvest and define them. Just as the poem warns against mistaking stillness for submission, Tsing reveals how life—unexpected, untamed—continues to seep through the cracks of destruction, carrying forward its own quiet resistance.
My poem, like her book, is a hopeful and critical meditation on interdependence, adaptation and the unexpected possibilities that arise in damaged landscapes. It is especially relevant to discussions of sustainability, Indigenous knowledge and ecological resilience.
Autonomous Waters: Dialogue with Adham Faramawy’s And These Deceitful Waters
Another work I referenced during the residency was Adham Faramawy’s And These Deceitful Waters, 2023 (Forma, 2023). Faramawy’s artwork and my poem “i, River” share thematic parallels. Both consider the intricate relationships between rivers, identity and the enduring forces of nature.
Faramawy’s work is a video and sculptural assemblage that examines the history of the River Thames, its subterranean tributaries and the flora along its banks. The piece portrays the Thames as a “colonial artery,” highlighting its role in the transportation of goods and treasures from colonised lands into the heart of the British Empire.
Through a combination of dance, music and spoken word, the artwork narrates migration stories associated with the river and its plant life, exploring how these elements contribute to the construction of national identity and the delineation of borders. The work underscores the fluidity of these processes, emphasising their susceptibility to continuous change.
Similarly, my poem personifies the river as an autonomous entity, asserting its enduring presence and resistance to human imposition. The poem’s foundation is grounding in the river’s timelessness; its capacity to outlast human endeavours, resonating with Faramawy’s exploration of the Thames’s historical significance and its transformation through colonial exploitation.
Both works address themes of colonialism and ecological change. Faramawy’s piece critiques the colonial history embedded within the Thames, illustrating how the river was instrumental in the empire’s expansion and the subsequent ecological ramifications. My poem echoes this sentiment by emphasising the river’s resilience against human attempts to control and exploit it.
Furthermore, both works emphasise the river’s role in shaping identity as a resistance to static definitions. Faramawy’s exploration of the Thames includes the narratives of migrants and the evolving identities along its banks, suggesting that national identity is a fluid construct influenced by continuous movement and change. Similarly, “i, River” portrays the river as a dynamic being, unaffected by transient human classifications, reinforcing the notion of fluid identity and the ephemeral nature of human constructs in the face of enduring natural entities.
When looking at my work and collaboration for the Transmission Residency, I find the poem provides the grounding critical for me to find my centre within the project. Since completing the poem, I immediately shared it with my group, this encouraged collaboration. The second reason I shared the poem was to directly share my Indigenous perspective on mud-larking—and the removal of any items from rivers here and in Toronto.
Poetic Agency: Sharing my poem as Method and Message
My poem, like a river, moves through and collects, leaves behind and incorporates varying portions of Tsing’s book and Faramawy’s art and the final piece of the Transmission Residency project is what each viewer will bring to the space, the ideas they will share and take away. Reflection of the self is what I hope my audience experiences.
The Methodology of Making the River in Clay
For nearly two weeks, I reflected on the poem. Then I uploaded it to Soundcloud, opening up its reach beyond exhibition walls. Simultaneously, I began working with clay, a return to material practice that allowed me to build from the poem’s themes. I started my River Goddess Series. The Figures interrupt the narrative of, “lost and forgotten,” instead, they echo the tone of the poem—resistant, enduring, autonomous.
The methodology followed a process of translation rather than replication: I listened to the poem on repeat whilst i learned to work the clay; I invited the rhythm and tone to guide my hands. The verses informed each form—the figures emerged from the emotional cadence of the lines, their curves and features shaped by intonation, not blueprint. This poetic-to-material moment ensured the clay held not only narrative, but tempo and breath. In this way, the goddesses are not illustrations on the river—they are echoes of its voice.
While making the figures, I also drew upon memories of my visit to Xochimilco just outside Mexico City. The historic floating gardens, slow-moving waters and layered Indigenous histories of that place stayed with me—the intertwining of ecology and ritual, of song and sustenance. The vibrant presence of the chinampas (farmland), the earth held gently by water, became a guiding metaphor as I worked with the clay. My hands recalled the soundscape of the birdsong and the scent of wet soil, folding that sensory knowledge into the shaping of each goddess. As I worked, I considered where my clay was extracted from—which riverbed lost its soil to the making of my sculptures.
Earth-Bodied Resistance: River Goddesses and Feminist Ecologies
The River Goddess sculptures emerge from the intersection of materiality, myth and critique. Crafted from terra cotta and layered with acrylic paint and gilded with gold leaf, these forms activate a visual vocabulary rooted in both the ancestral and the contemporary. Their fractured, armless torsos and hollowed eye sockets gesture not only toward bodily trauma and endurance but also speak back to dominant art historical and institutional narratives that have long sidelined women’s labour, Indigenous cosmologies and ecologies of care.
Clay and the Feminine Earth
The use of clay—as body, memory and terrain—grounds my practice in a lineage that extends across millennia and cultures. Earth is not an inert material but a living force—often gendered as mother or goddess. Working with clay, especially in figurative form, reclaims a direct lineage with early goddess iconography: objects of ritual, protection and ancestral continuity. As experienced through the work of artists Judy Chicago and Ana Mendieta; clay as a medium can resist the detachment often expected in institutional settings and instead insist on tactility, vulnerability and bodily presence (Pollock, 1996).
My sculptural practice does not seek wholeness or perfection. Their gestural, broken forms reflect their use as votive, devotional—not objects simply to be admired, but active, working goddesses. These are not passive relics; their wear reflects their usefulness, forcing viewers to sit with the reality of erasure, pain and the persistence of women’s unseen labour. The sculptures offer not closure, but confrontation.
Gold Leaf and Extractive Violence
The incorporation of gold leaf introduces an ecological and colonial critique. Gold has long symbolised divinity and power in religious iconography, yet it is also emblematic of extraction, conquest and exploitation—particularly in the Americas. In gilding my goddesses, I simultaneously reference the sacred and the plundered. These surfaces shimmer, seduce and deceive—just as gold has historically done—inviting viewers to question their own desires for beauty, opulence and ownership.
Seen through a feminist ecological art lens, this gilding process critiques the patriarchal disconnection from land as life-giver and reasserts the body as part of the earth’s ecology. The gold becomes not adornment but indictment: an indictment made sacred only through its exposure. Ana Mendieta (Museum of Modern Art New York, USA) explored similar tensions—where earth-based practices reveal the violences of colonialism, capitalism and gendered dispossession. If clay asserts a lineage of feminine presence, gold interrupts that narrative—marking where that presence has been commodified, worshipped or erased.
The Performance of Practice, the Practice of Performance
January into February into March into Flux(us)
The winter months were heavy with drawing, Fluxus-inspired experimentation, tutorials and a profound overload of canvases in a studio too small for my ambitions. Susan Sontag entered the conversation, as did Postsensual Aesthetics. I asked myself, What does abject mean to me? Somewhere in the layering, a monumental March arrived—along with a microphone. The microphone can act as a weapon, a tool and an amplifier for the unheard—a sentiment echoed in Sara Ahmed’s work on feminist voice and resistance (Ahmed, 2017).
From Fiasco to Focus: Speaking Into the Frame
The feedback from my speech regarding the future of monuments was encouraging. It felt like a milestone. A few weeks earlier, I flubbed a presentation—rambling, unfocused, over time. Instead of letting shame set in, I saw it as data—insights. I started booking the seminar room on Thursday mornings to practice. I wrote a two-minute lift pitch, rehearsed with slides and performed mock presentations to supportive peers.
When the opportunity came to speak on monuments, I was ready. Still nervous—especially as the final speaker—but I was also prepared. This time, I finished on time, on script and with impact. It was a reclamation of my voice. It was a moment of channeling bell hooks words, “When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.” (hooks, 1994, p. 216).
Teaching to Learn: Relief Printing and Shared Listening
Following that success, I led my first-ever workshop. I love printmaking for its physicality and its politics—how it has historically travelled hand to hand, wall to wall, street to protest, carrying messages of resistance and solidarity. In Mexico, printmaking has long been a form of dissent, from Jose Guadalupe Posada’s satirical skeletons, which mocked political power—I intended to bring that energy to my workshop.
The workshop; five participants, five sets of tools and one teacher—me. After four years in art education, I knew what students want from my tutors—to listen more closely than speak, to respond without disrupting the creative flow. It was rewarding and revealing to watch my fellow art students working with my guidance. Teaching clarified something about my role as artist, activist and facilitator—trust. The more I trusted them, the more they explored in their own making.
Through teaching I discovered how I can nurture the creative energy of others while maintaining my authentic voice. The experience taught me that both roles demand a balance of control and openness—control in guiding the process and openness in allowing space for others’ ideas and growth. This balance enhances my understanding of how art can be a shared experience and how my work can expand when engaging others.
Lights, Camera, Action & Spontaneous Outbursts
In the same week as the Monumental speech, I joined Juliet Sugg’s abject art workshop. The timing was electric. The result: The Joy (making in the face of the patriarchy)—a body of work that unearthed the grotesque and the beautiful from a charged personal interaction. A male workshop participant commented on my bare face, my hair pulled back—his words igniting a quiet fury. That fury found form in visual language. I turned his micro-aggressions into macro-expressions.
We Win When We Work
I washed my face,
pulled back my hair,
stepped into the room,
ready to move,
to play,
to find the grotesque in the beautiful,
the beauty in the grotesque.
He sat across from me,
a latecomer,
a stranger,
but somehow,
he decided—
I will talk to her about her appearance.
“Whoa, you look really different today.”
Yesterday, I stood,
I spoke of monuments.
Today, I sat,
I prepared to create.
But all he saw was my hair,
my bare face,
the absence of decoration.
“The hair pulled back—no makeup.”
He couldn’t stop himself.
Entitlement is a runaway train.
Beside me, another voice—
“I had someone comment on my hair once…”
and I knew,
we knew,
this moment,
this silencing.
Because the upbringing of polite
crashes against
“Why are you being so fucking rude to me?”
And our words collapse in the wreckage.
I don’t know who put micro
in front of aggression.
Probably a bloke.
There is nothing micro about being made
to feel small.
We Win When We Work: Poetry, Politics and Process
The above poem became a manifesto—both witness and resistance. In this work, I collated personal experience with performative feminist resistance. I drew parallels with the work of Sasha Gordon. Gordon’s self-portraits often depict her nude body in various surreal scenarios. She interrogates the gaze, issues of misogyny, racism and homophobia, challenging societal norms and exploring the complexities of identity (Amia, 2024).
In Sasha Gordon’s Trimmings, I reflect on the never-ending maintenance the patriarchy demands of the female. Trimming of facial and body hair, trimming of weight, nails—even teeth (I once had a dentist tell me I could have a prettier smile if I smoothed off the rough edges of my front teeth). Women are always just one good trimming away from, “the ideal.”
Here is Gordon’s work giving a very good laugh to it all. Firstly, by putting her true voluptuous self into the painting, then a topiary of herself. Then the trimming of her topiary self feeds into the interrogation. By the figure looking at the viewer, she invites us to ask ourselves, how we internalise the coloniser/patriarchy mentality.
When I consider the whole painting, the English garden setting, I think of the gardens around the world filled with statues of naked women. The, “woman as object” ongoing subliminal messaging we endure—regardless of age or culture. There, at the back of the painting is a hint at infinity…the gate with clouds beyond it. I see a representation of the never-ending nightmare of the male gaze and our own role within that narrative.
Gordon’s work affirms my practice in that I know I am not the only artist working with and through themes of self, identity and making space for the viewer to also find her voice. She is showing us what grit looks like when we raise our self awareness with image making.
In Gordon’s 2023 major museum debut exhibition at the ICA Miami, her paintings were described to have, “visions…anxious and intimate at once, teetering somewhere between tenderness and night terror” (David Zwirner, 2023). I ask myself, anxious for whom? The patriarchy? A terror? Or a comedic genius?
Erotic Tensions: Hokusai, Bubble Wrap and Abject Joy
With The Joy photograph, reactions ranged from erotic to perverse to comedic—proof I was doing something significant. Since it was a photograph, I had new materials to consider, the mounting and framing. My decision to have the photograph framed with a faux gold-leaf wooden frame that brought back a feeling of historic painting and a red velvet mounting created another layer of aesthetics to the work.
The image is hyper-feminised, her heavily made-up face beams through the haze of the plastic bubble wrap smothering her face. The smile across her face hints at the slippery line between pleasure and peril. The moment captured blends boudoir softness with the charged atmosphere of erotic self-endangerment.
Outside of the academic setting, the photograph will be simply titled, The Joy. Thereby leaving the image to stand on its own, regardless of the backstory or the film. I invite each viewer to read their own preferences into the work.
This work reminds me of my early art collection days—The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife by Hokusai. That piece and The Joy, separated by centuries, both embrace abjection and eroticism. Each offers a space where pleasure and horror overlap.
Hokusai’s, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife(1814), an example of, Shunga, (erotic Japanese prints), which blends sensuality with the surreal. This woodblock print depicts a woman intimately engaged in sex with two octopuses—one caressing her face while the larger one envelops her body.
The work embraces an unsettling dynamic—sexual pleasure between the human and the non-human. The fluidity of tentacles blurs the boundaries between submission and empowerment, repulsion and ecstasy and pleasure. The entanglement becomes a metaphor for feminine desire that is both liberated and monstrous, reflecting a cultural fascination with hybridity and the erotic potential of the unknown.
The above photograph is a little nod to the bubblewrap that smothers my face in the photograph and the bubblewrap used to provide security to the finished piece.
Unlike Hokusai’s delicate yet graphic sensuality, this piece leans into the abject—the rejection of the body’s limits and the confrontation with mortality. The plastic film over the face blurs identity, distorts the body and creates a tension that is both unsettling and strangely intimate—more so in the academic setting where everyone thinks they know me. The expression is unclear. In that lack of clarity, it suggests themes of self-destruction, fetishism and the fragility of human existence.
As a Mexican woman artist, creating erotic and uncomfortable bodies of work, The Joy, pushes against sanitised and eroticised depictions of pleasure. Unlike Hokusai’s work, framed within a male fantasy of consent and spectacle, my work disrupts virility and control.
Plastic here shields and suffocates, resisting the viewer’s desire for clarity, beauty or coherence in the erotic. Within Mexican mythology, the feminine is both creator and destroyer—Coxyolxauhqui’s dismembered body, Tlazolteotl’s divine dirtiness—figures that reject the neatness of Western feminist expectations.
The Joy is not submissive; it is feral, blurred and bodily. It claims its right to ambiguity and rage within intimacy. In fact, I could argue that as the sole figure in the work it also represents the pleasure a woman can receive without the presence of man.
Birth Rites and Postcards: Conversation with My Mother
As I considered my output over the last few months, it bought to mind some 2022 work. Two photography/video works I made in response to the Birth Rites Residency at the University of Kent.
The residency centred on a collection of contemporary artworks that consider child birth rites and rituals.
In looking at all the birth rites artworks—heavily leaning towards the “joy and ecstasy” fairytale of motherhood, I was frustrated with the depictions of birth rites and motherhood. The first responsive work I created, “Go Fuck Yourself” a poster for supporting masturbation and self pleasure.
Working solely with my phone for both photography and video works—keeping figurative art at the centre. I staged the student accommodation room to make this postcard, “Go fuck yourself” as a play on words—reflecting both my rejection of the glorification of childbirth and a nod to masturbation.
The second piece, Conversations with my Mother, was a short film. The film was a recorded conversation between my mother and I as the narration with still photos of our text messages and the artwork topic. My mother, who lives in Oregon and I talked for several minutes about the photograph entitled, “Terese in Ecstatic Childbirth.” The work is a “rephotographed” image from the book, “A Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin.” The book was originally publish in the 1960s.
During the residency, many participants focused on the photo itself—what it is showing. That was not controversial to me….what I was intrigued by was the term, “rephotograph” and how that plays out in the legal world that art exists within. Who gets to rephotograph work? How far does consent stretch? (a little cervix humour)
We Win When We Work, Part Two: Sardines, Shame and the Politics of Lunch
Fast forward to Winter Term 2025, there was a turning point in my abject making workshop where I replied to a random comment, “I don’t draw because it is the only thing I know how to do, I can make art in lots of ways,” and since then I have expanded my art practice to include, “every idea I think.”
That is when I made the We Win When We Work poem my manifesto. After creating, The Joy, I gained the confidence to make another short film, Melina Merlin Eating a Tin of Sardines.
Why sardines? Someone in art school called my sardine lunch, “disgusting, revolting.” The comments stung—not just in the hostility of his words, but the deeper implication that my food, my culture and by extension I did not belong in that space. Like The Joy, the moment called on my grit to challenge my attacker through art.
I pulled from the canon. I updated Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger, into my lived experience (Warhol, 1981). I filmed myself, at my kitchen table, Mexican table cloth in place, hot sauce instead of ketchup, bright red lips, little red vest, tattoos proudly showing. With each bite I shared expressions of hunger, pleasure and satisfaction; the messiness of eating sardines by hand, the oil running down my arm, the licking of fish flesh against my lips—it is all in there for the viewer. After filming, I pulled still photos to create this five-part series.
While my art practice reflects my perception of my life, these works were made hours after the interactions. There is no distillation of experience transferred and reconfigured through myth-making characters drawn on paper. Using my image and voice, I work to test systems, not just for sound—but for cracks.
After my last crit, the question was raised, if I would continue my drawing practice now that I am interrogating the art education institutions through performance, poetry, film and photography. That question misses the point entirely. My practice centres on lived experiences, materiality and reconfiguring power structures. My materiality expands from the pencil to the pixel.
From Screen to Pencil: Back to the Drawing Board
Drawing in Strawberry Fields
This work began as a response to the dissonance I felt listening to news reports in London regarding deportation events in the USA. In many reports, our right to remain in the United States was defended, not on human rights grounds, but through our, economic contribution to the US economy. This reduction of our identity to productivity ignited a need to draw. I considered our work in fields, strawberry fields. The fields of my California-based youth. I began to draw, with slowness and attentiveness, in charge of my own productivity. The work became a methodological act of resistance. The finished pieces reclaimed presence, dignity and reflected my politically defiant sense of humour.
This methodological approach serves as a quiet act of resistance to extractive documentation. I embraced a mode of slowness. I told a story as absurd as that of Mexicans = Money, being blasted across social media. My methodology regarding materiality remained consistent; my choosing graphite, charcoal—of-the-earth-mediums, the materials retain a physical connection to the land. It is within the images themselves that I show my flex to the economics argument. I know what I am doing, I am giving a funny little fuck-you to that narrative. So, watch a snail and woman make love, another woman give birth to strawberries and the final mother with a bountiful basket of strawberries and cream—a favourite dessert in my new English home.
Drawing in the Net
Before starting this programme, the poetry, videos and diaristic stories that inspire my painted drawings lived quietly in my journals and sketchbooks. Now, by revealing these processes—by leaning into the lived experience—I offer a multitude of works to the audience. I am an artist. There is no material I cannot use.
CODA
This body of work does not seek resolution, but opens space—for questioning, for remembering, for remaking. Across five essays, I followed instincts led by material, memory and resistance. Each text forms a point of friction, where dominant narratives are unsettled and alternative understandings are shaped through my artistic process.
This is a practice rooted in refusal: of neat categories, of institutional comfort, of passive observation. Writing and making have moved side by side, not as explanation and example, but as equal gestures of inquiry.
This dissertation stands as a living archive of survival, refusal and becoming—an invitation to sit with the uncomfortable and stay present in the making.
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