Degree Show 2025

You could say this is my anthropological study of western teen girlhood when I was 7. My model replica of what I imagined an English girl my age would be living in at home. What I imagined my peers may be living in at home.

So I suppose in that way it is fulfilling a vouyeristic urge to understand what the hell was going on in this place. Behind the doors through which I couldn’t see. The lives I could only imagine…

The result is a slightly filled-in collection of objects. Things I saw on TV and liked. Things that I impressed me. Things that girls around me actually had. All sorts of things.

It’s about my experience as an immigrant style individual and the moment I began to try to integrate into Western Culture (a long and laborious process). That moment was those early tween experiences- 2007.

In my essay, called Fantasising becoming a Westerner, I write “ the work that I am presenting is only decolonial in dialogue with
my own experiences and in specific context, the whole exhibition relies on dialogue and subtle
combinations of concepts”. I think this rings true for how this installation must be read to make any sense. I am sort of important to it.

Looking back at all of this, all of it, I can see why it was challenging. But then it felt like a big fat nobody could give a toss about how completely confusing and impossible I was finding it.

Like, nobody teaches you how to talk to parents. I didn’t know how to use English expressions of politeness, I didn’t know what Tea was, or what it practically entailed and neither did my mother. I didn’t know what sleepover etiquette was and I was deeply embarrassed about it. All understandably… it was upsetting.

 

And yet my mother had quite a bravdic, I-don’t-need-to-know-what-tea-is, they-can-take-their-tea-and-shove-it-up-their-arse kind of attitude. Which also confused me. Why should they take their tea and shove it up their arse? I’d quite like to experience, what I have heard, is fish fingers and peas. I’d like that. And if it’s not that, perhaps I’d like that too. I won’t know if you keep saying that I don’t need their teas. Anyway.

I wanted to be in, and then I got in. And th en, confusingly (heroically), I refused to give up my own approaches and become culturally English. So I was proudly different but surrounded myself with the in-crowd. Of white English people. Why? Good question. Here is the answer.

 

Well the truth is, I haven’t figured it out. I, sadly, appear to have figured very little of it out.

 

I think there is some old 2007 juju energy from my struggles wanting to be heard in my artwork. And I think I hear a hark to be a pop star for unknown (potentially attention-based) reasons.