The Personal Story Behind Cartography of Survival

Content note: This post contains references to sexual assault, addiction, self-harm, and suicide. Please read with care.

There Are Parts of This Story That Are Not Mine to Tell

Some belong to members of my family whose privacy I will always protect. Others remain too painful to describe, their details impossible to separate from the people who lived them. What I can say is that, over several years, my family experienced events that fundamentally altered the course of our lives. They changed our relationships, our sense of safety, and our understanding of what the future might look like.

Trauma is often imagined as something that happens in a single moment. My experience has been different. Trauma begets trauma. Trauma lingers. It rewires nervous systems. It disrupts sleep, concentration and confidence. It narrows your world until living in the present becomes less a philosophy than a necessity. It changes futures — quietly, and permanently.

With the full permission of my child — now nineteen — what I will share is this: sexual assault, experienced outside the family and not disclosed to me until long after it occurred. Drug and alcohol addiction. Serious and frequent self-harm and suicide ideation — in one instance, a plan known by others that was not revealed until the eleventh hour. Hospital admissions. Mental health crises. And the particular anguish of discovering that once your child reaches a certain age, the medical system effectively closes the door on you as a parent, leaving you to advocate from the outside with no information, no protective influence and no ability to provide context.

Alongside all of this, life continued to unfold. My mother died in 2018. Burnout forced me away from work for almost a year. At fifty, I received a formal diagnosis of ADHD — giving language, finally, to something I had sensed throughout my life but never fully understood. We returned to my hometown. Financial uncertainty became a constant companion. None of these things existed in isolation. Together, they formed the landscape through which I was trying to find my way.

When Life Becomes Overwhelming, My Instinct Is to Retreat

I become quiet.

I withdrew from friendships because I no longer knew how to answer the simple question, "How are you?" I couldn't pretend everything was fine, but I grew exhausted explaining why it wasn't. I stopped attending social events. I withdrew from social media. Where I had once worn my heart openly — a people pleaser, always happy to chat with a stranger — I became guarded. I hardened my exterior to protect what softness remained inside.

Much of that hardening came from experiences with institutions I had once trusted. As a lawyer by training, I have always believed in process, expertise and fairness. But navigating schools, mental health services and medical systems on behalf of a struggling child taught me something I hadn't expected: that snap judgements are made in moments of extraordinary vulnerability, and that small comments, delivered casually, can carry enormous weight.

A school official, when meeting with me about the latest upset caused by my youngest child, remarked without hesitation: "I knew your eldest son — he's a lovely young man. I'm not sure what's gone wrong here." I was there asking for help.

A psychiatrist invited me to give the full picture, then — mid-sentence — raised his palm and said, flatly: "Stop talking." We never went back.

Another, when I quietly mentioned that I thought I might have ADHD too and was taking notes on my phone so I wouldn't forget her instructions, looked up with hostility and said: "Well, you better not try the medication." We never went back.

A GP who barely knew us, after a particularly brutal week, told me that my child and I were "enmeshed" — delivered like a diagnosis, like a moral failing, with no explanation and no support offered. I was too exhausted to ask what she meant. We never went back.

Individually, these moments might seem small. But when you are desperate, frightened, and trying to hold everything together, they accumulate. I stopped looking for certainty in those spaces. I learned instead to protect my own interior world.

It was in that space that the work began.

I Never Sat Down With the Intention of Making an Exhibition About Survival

There was no sketchbook filled with plans. No concept waiting to be realised. I simply returned, again and again, to the repetitive labour of making.

Knitting. Binding. Wrapping. Twisting. Stitching.

Hours would pass in silence. Sometimes quiet tears accompanied the work. Sometimes anger. Sometimes only exhaustion. My ADHD superpower — hyperfocus — meant I could lose myself in the process for hours at a stretch, and in that losing, find something close to peace. The wool itself would often resist. Felted merino is dense and physical; it takes real strength to work with. There were moments when I had to push through the material the same way I was pushing through everything else — with commitment, steadfastness, and the refusal to walk away.

The repetitive movements gradually settled my nervous system in ways I couldn't explain. The process became less about producing an object than about creating enough calm to face another day.

The forms arrived before their meaning.

Each sculpture solved a problem I could not yet articulate. They emerged instinctively, carrying something I was unable to express in words. Only later did the patterns reveal themselves.

The tethered hearts spoke of enduring love. The tangled forms became family systems under pressure. The armoured structures reflected the painstaking work of rebuilding. The boundary works marked the gradual learning of discernment and self-protection. The knots became acts of holding — grief, anger, love, resentment, endurance and hope, all existing together, refusing simple resolution.

These Works Are Not Records of What Happened

They are records of adaptation.

They ask what we become when circumstances refuse to resolve themselves. How we continue to love while carrying grief. How we remain open without abandoning ourselves. How we repair — not once, but repeatedly. How we continue to build a life while quietly carrying what cannot be put down.

The title Cartography of Survival arrived only after the work was complete. It seemed to describe what my hands had known long before I did.

This exhibition is not a conclusion. The story it tells is still unfolding. New experiences continue to reshape the landscape, and new works continue to emerge in response.

Perhaps that is the most honest thing I can say.

It is not a map of where I have been.

It is a map of how I continue to find my way.