In October 2025, I exhibited TWELVE at the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival.
The theme was Comfort and Disturb. And that’s exactly where this work lives.
Created over the course of the first year following my diagnosis of complex PTSD, Twelve is a raw and honest reflection of life inside a mind rearranging itself after trauma.
Each piece represents one month of that year, a year of shadow and sharpness, of deep unraveling and fragile becoming.
I used collage, found materials, and fragments of the everyday, including medication packaging to give shape to the inner chaos and to honour the quiet rituals that kept me tethered.
This collection does not try to make trauma beautiful. Instead, it invites you to sit beside it. To witness the discomfort and the ache, but also the flickers of comfort the softness of a teacup, the memory of a poem, a scrap of light through the trees.
TWELVE exists in the tension between comfort and disturbance. It is a record of survival. A whispered truth.
A mirror for anyone who’s ever had to begin again in the dark.
Month One – SHATTER
The world collapsed with a single word. Diagnosis.
Everything fractured. Grief and fear rushed in.
Month Two – FOG
I moved through the days wrapped in cotton wool.
Nothing felt real. Not even me.
Month Three – SURVIVAL
Take the pills. Drink the water. Breathe. Repeat.
That was enough.
Month Four – OVERWHELM
The past pressed down like stone.
I lived beneath it.
Month Five – RAGE
It came hot and wild.
At the silence. The system. The lost years.
Month Six – ACHE
I mourned the things I never had.
Loneliness held my hand.
Month Seven – WITHDRAW
I disappeared for a while.
It was the safest place I knew.
Month Eight – TRACE
Fragments surfaced: scents, sounds, forgotten names.
I followed the trail.
Month Nine – RESIST
I began saying no.
To exhaustion. To guilt. To old patterns.
Month Ten – TEND
Small kindnesses saved me.
Tea. Sky. Dog. Breath.
Month Eleven – SPEAK
The words came from deep inside.
And they were mine.
