I've always been drawn to otherness — alternative culture, tattoos, strange creatures, difficult women, and things that don't quite fit where they're put.

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A lot of my work comes from that feeling. I’m deeply emotional, probably too empathic for my own good, and I’ve never quite fit the spaces I’m supposed to belong. That feeling has only become stranger as I’ve got older and found myself increasingly surrounded by domesticity when I am, fundamentally, not a very domestic creature. So I make things that don’t quite belong either. Weird fish. Mermaids in baked-bean baths. Creatures dropped into very human worlds. Women who have been told they’re too loud, too difficult, too emotional, too much.

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After leaving art at seventeen, I spent years working in corporate marketing — watching feminism, queerness and social causes repeatedly turned into campaigns, slogans and things to sell. Eventually, I wanted to make something that actually meant what it said.

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Villains has given that frustration somewhere to go. I paint women who have been diminished, demonised or disbelieved, then use the words and actions from their stories to physically alter their portraits. The work is about witnessing what happened to them, and giving them space to reclaim the narrative afterwards.

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I left art at seventeen. Nearly twenty years later, I’ve found my way back to it.