ARTIVIST | Gallery Grounds | 6.06.25 - 20.06.25

I was delighted to be invited to exhibit in ARTIVIST, an exciting group show at Gallery Grounds in Southampton. Curated by Gülçin Pehlivan Tezdiker, the exhibition brought together artists who use their work to speak out—against injustice, erasure, oppression, and silence. It felt like a natural fit for me and my practice, which often centres around angry, humorous, and questioning text across banners, flags, and found objects.

Gallery Grounds is a newly founded independent contemporary art space run by Aycan Erinsel Özistek and Gülçin Pehlivan Tezdiker, two women deeply rooted in artistic practice and cultural dialogue. Their mission is to build a space for collaboration and community, and the exhibition really embodied that.

The ARTIVIST exhibition was framed around the idea that art can, and should, carry ethical weight. It called in artists who aren’t afraid to make noise—artists who resist, who witness, who take up space. The themes ranged from environmental collapse to gendered violence, political decay to personal reckoning.

I contributed three pieces that, together, felt like a solid cross-section of my work—funny, furious, political, and deeply personal.

The first, a banner made from an old blind slat, reads: Can we all stop playing Michael Jackson songs. It’s black and white, plain-spoken, and to the point. It’s about cultural amnesia, and about what we choose to ignore when the music’s good or the memories are nice. It’s also about boundaries, and the discomfort of naming something we’re all pretending not to see.

The second piece was a string of hand-painted bunting that reads: Jacob Rees-Mogg is a Haunted Pencil. It’s deliberately cheerful at first glance—pretty, whimsical, almost silly—but that’s part of the trap. I like making things that smuggle in bite-sized fury. People approach it smiling, then squint to read the text and go, “Wait, what?” That moment of recognition is powerful. It catches people off guard, which I think is sometimes the most effective way to get under the skin. Both of these pieces were displayed draped across a magnificent sculpture, which gave them a sense of gravity and presence I really appreciated.

The third piece I showed was a British flag titled Note to Self. This one is a more personal work, and one I made in the aftermath of a painful breakup. It documents, in my handwriting, some of the things I could no longer unhear—the thinly veiled racism and casual cruelty I experienced from members of my ex’s family. It's not an easy piece, but it’s an honest one. Writing it onto the flag—a national symbol already thick with meaning—was part of reclaiming my own narrative. This flag was held aloft by an angelic sculpture in the gallery, and seeing it floating above eye-level made me feel like the piece was speaking back and standing up.

The other artists in ARTIVIST brought powerful and deeply personal acts of resistance to the room. I was moved by a defiant self-portrait by painter Freydis O’Reilly—an intimate, radical assertion of self—and a haunting portrait of Donald Trump by Michele Waldron Cooper that refused to flinch or soften its subject. Across the space, every piece held its own protest.

Huge thanks to Gülçin for inviting me to be part of such a thoughtful and necessary show, and to Gallery Grounds for creating a space where work like mine feels right at home. I’m excited to see what they do next.