Brooklyn
Participatory Portrait
She was
a liar
Brooklyn was a child when she spoke about what had happened to her. What followed was a battle over whose version of her story would be believed.
Brooklyn grew up without the safety a child should be able to expect from either parent. Her mother struggled with alcoholism, and between the ages of six and nine Brooklyn was sexually abused by her stepfather. She later went to live with her father, but says he turned a blind eye to abuse from her stepmother while working offshore.
At fifteen, Brooklyn put herself into care. By seventeen she had signed a lease on a room and begun building a life that belonged to her. She went on to lose seven stone, become a nuclear tunneller, buy her first home alone at twenty-five and, after five years of infertility and IVF, become a mother to her son, Ari.
Brooklyn does not tell her story with bitterness. She says she is grateful for the life she has built, and even grateful to her parents for showing her exactly the kind of parent she did not want to become.
In her words, she is living proof that you do not have to become a statistic.
THE DESTRUCTION
Silenced
About the Work
2026
Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
I drowned Brooklyn’s portrait in red wine, allowing it to bleed through the paint and blur the definition of her face. The wine references the alcoholism that formed part of her childhood, but the distortion also became an attempt at erasure: the clearer portrait underneath is still there, but harder to see.
Tape crosses her mouth in reference to the abuse she describes experiencing from her stepfather, including the words used to silence and normalise what was happening to her: “Shush, it’s just a kissing game.” More tape wraps around the canvas carrying language used against her in court.
The destruction is about repeated attempts to silence Brooklyn and replace her account with other people’s versions of events. This portrait witnesses her truth, what happened to her afterwards, and the fact that despite everything used to obscure her, she is still here.