I created this piece when I was in rehab. I primarily did it to soothe myself, as I was finding being away from home difficult and I find drawing helpful for that. On reflection, I think it represents the never ending of feeling of taking one step forwards and two steps back. I would get myself in a position where I felt on top of things and then the next day I would feel like I had fallen off a cliff and was starting again. Rehab helped me learn that this is normal though and I can manage these feelings without using substances to escape them.

I was introduced to this phrase when I was in rehab and it struck a chord in me. It means that if do not rush or if you avoid being too hasty, then eventually you will achieve your goal - in other words, be patient. I used to look for that magic pill (literally) to fix me but thanks to this phrase, I started to appreciate I am on a long journey towards healing. If I make very small and subtle changes to how I am living my life, these will grow into habits and I will start to benefit from them gradually. I try not to compare myself to others who grasp things quicker than me. I am on my own journey and I am happy with that.

This is a quick illustration of my take on the EMDR therapy I have been doing recently. Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing helps you process the negative images, emotions, beliefs and body sensations associated with traumatic memories that seem to be stuck. For me it has really helped reduce the anxiety I felt every time I got in a car, following a bad accident I had a year ago.

This illustration shows the reality of how addiction pans out. Once a healthy man has drunk himself to death and his ghost sips a beer, it rises from the empty beer cans. It is inevitable how it will end and when I’m suffering, I struggle to break the cycle. However, thanks to a lot of hard work, I have started to find coping mechanisms that keep me on the right track.

I question my existence and whether it should exist. Just like a fish in a bag; the world can be suffocating and things can feel unfair. I am not a victim and I never will be. I hope that fish is swimming in the sky now, away from the scariness down here.

This artwork is from my original painting on canvas. The inspiration behind the artwork is because I tried so hard to live my life, all by myself. But at the end of the day, either I need a gf or I just need my mother. I can't figure it out.

“Research has shown that chronic boredom can increase your risk factors for mental health issues, leading to negative thinking patterns, impulsivity, and self-destructive behaviours.” You can say that again. I need to keep myself busy otherwise I start to feel really s**t about myself and negative emotions start to overwhelm me. But I am learning to sit with myself, knowing these emotions are only temporary and practicing meditation too.

We are collective of mindblown individuals, seeking a better way to identify and relate with each other.

Keep your wits about you. Even the most harmless looking thing can change your life. But remember that can also be a good thing.

This multi-medium design signifies the untamed intensity of female rage. Fiery hues and sharp lines convey the unapologetic power and frustration that simmers within me.

I feel a strong connection to its fierce energy, recognising the collective strength of women who refuse to be silenced, as they rage against injustice and inequality.

I created this painting with my sister using The Creation of Adam (Michaelangelo) as inspiration because for me, it reveals a lot of symbolism on the idea of distance.

Physical distance and mental distance are so different, and sometimes it feels like an idea, or a person is just a touch of a hand away, when in fact, it is not a reality in your physical world.

I struggle with the idea of letting go, but find that when I do, I decrease my suffering immensely. The blue writing signifies the deep simplicity of letting go, whilst the fiery background represents the anguish that many of us go through when trying to get past something.

The duality of human nature hopefully comes across in this painting.

Inside the four walls of her room, she sits atop a wooden digital box printing out the diagnosis of mirror count #1104 that reads "Gettng There." Nobody knows the lengths she has gone down the rabbit hole of appearance issues, a journey of countless mirror gazing of her facial features, testing the mirror's authenticity. She believed it, but the strewn papers of negative diagnoses constantly reminded her that soon enough, she would be "Okay."

Being at peace with peace. Inspired by leaning into those awkward silences and stealing them as moments of consciousness.

In a world where beauty standards often feel as rigid as iron, I stumbled upon a phrase that whispered a message of empowerment and self-love. I choose to embrace my body, lovingly lathering on sunscreen and hitting the beach with a smile. I not only tan my skin, but my spirit too, basking in the warmth of self-acceptance. The most attractive glow is the one that comes from within.

Reflecting back to when I created this, I was suffering silently with some dysmorphic behaviours and often felt a heavy sense of disconnection from people I encountered on a daily basis. My mental energy was exhausted in the depth of my own self critical obsessions, and I would observe the confidence of others around me in admiration. I started noticing that people’s confidence often came from a certain intelligence or skillset that gave them a strong sense of purpose and substance. If I found the intellectual mind so attractive in other people, then why was I prioritising vanity over my own intelligence? The depth of the mind was the most attractive thing to me, and this realisation pushed me out of dysmorphia and into healthy habits of educating myself rather than hating myself.

In this work I just want freedom, where my past is full of prohibitions, when I grow up I want to get that freedom and I pour it into the work, in a form that doesn't make any sense, depicting the twists and turns of my life, and I choose the colours - bright colours so that everyone who sees it feels happy, even though behind happiness there is always a sad story.

A doodle in grief moment from the first summer without my late boyfriend, Hugo. I guess I'm illustrating how unfair it is that no matter how much you love and long for someone, time gets to keep moving forward without them.

I always say I'm fine when people ask how I am because the word 'fine' is such a safe and easy response when talking about how I'm feeling. It doesn't require any thinking or reflection and sometimes that's what I need when I'm suffering. It's not necessarily helpful but it's just easy when I'm tired of suffering. I guess the black box just exaggerates the 'fine'; simple, empty and nothingness.

No matter how hard I try to avoid it, chaos seems to follow me everywhere I go. As I gazed at the design I had just created, I saw my life unfold before me. A tumultuous blend of colours and shapes swirled relentlessly, mimicking the relentless chaos that seems to follow me wherever I go. In its centre, a lone figure stood, unperturbed, serving as a reminder of the perpetual storm that clings to my every step.

This is how I feel when stress gets the better of me. I feel totally trapped in my own head and uncomfortable in my own body. But life doesn't have to be like this all the time. After all, life is short and sometimes it is helpful to see the bigger picture.

I feel stuck and unable to escape my depression at the minute. It is really weighing me down and the harder I try to combat it, the more stuck I feel. I don't know a way out at the minute but I have promised myself to keep doing the next best thing and eventually I will start to see the light again.

A gentle reminder to myself to take a couple of moments now and again to breathe. It's amazing how much calmer I feel after taking ten deep breaths.

This represents my desperation of wanting to be led through life, as opposed to constantly feeling like I am having to find my own way. I always wished I'd had a guide.

This is a representation of my anxiety and depression. My depression feels like being in warm sticky glue that hardens preventing anything from releasing itself from its hold. It’s soft and goes but quickly becomes cold, tacky and crusty. My anxiety feels like something is weighing on me - feeling that my chest and body can’t breathe properly and my lungs are trapped under a huge weight. Aaahhhh…please politely remove yourself from my life!

As someone that suffers from dissociative identity disorder, I experience intense changes in my identity. I often feel like different aspects of my identity are in control of my behaviour and thoughts at different times.

This is my take on the well known emotions wheel, which in my eyes, is wayyy too perfect looking. My therapist tells me to try and identify with what emotion I am feeling. How about, “I don’t f***ing know!!” My emotions are all over the place and all I feel most of the time is anxiety, so how am I meant to work out what else I am feeling? But actually thanks to the hard work I have put in, in therapy, I am now able to appreciate that I am not anxious every second of the day, even though it sometimes feels like that. I do have other emotions. It’s just about identifying with them and knowing that they will pass, even though it feels like they won’t.

I drew this because I like to focus on the things that make me happy. The small things, the big things… they’re all just as important as each other. Drinking my morning cup of tea in bed or dancing in front of a big speaker at a festival with your friends or walking outside in my local hills. When I feel down, these are the things that make me happy.

'True self' is the wonder of self image, it is the wonder of what a person is now, as opposed to what he or she becomes without a purpose of self. There is no foundation, it's like the body is stepping away from its shadow, it is like peering in the mirror with eyes closed, I would touch my face and draw my portrait with my fingers, stripping the impurities of my portrait covered in paint and debris and in stillness wonder why the material is heavy on the head.

This piece focuses on the reclamation of the voice and spirit after a time of solitude, trauma and isolation. It helps to recognise, talk and open your mouth about the things that have hurt and harmed you - to those that love you.

This design represents the experience I have with BDD-at times I can see my face as a jumbled up mixture of facial features, almost like Frankenstein’s monster or a patchwork face comprising of all the “wrong” parts.

This piece was made during a stay at an adolescent treatment centre for addiction. I used painting and drawing as a form of expression and, in retrospect, I feel this piece came as a response to my changing identity. I no longer had the culture of drugs, nor the environment and relationships that came with it, that I identified with before so was left only with the ability to look inwards.

The calming blue and green represent the constant balance. The red circles represent all the opinions.

I have struggled with coping with the ups and downs of my mental health over the last few years, to the point that I feel that I can’t talk to people about it anymore, as I worry I am being a burden on them. Instead, I don’t let on how bad I am feeling, to the point that most people think I am totally fine. Where as in fact, I am really struggling inside.

I have decided to go back to therapy though and this has been a helpful outlet to be honest about how I feel. It hasn’t cured everything and I don’t think it ever will but it makes living with my struggles a little bit easier.

People seem to come and go in my life all the time. I just want to find a steady relationship because at the moment I feel totally out of control and have nobody to lean on when I need it.

I have always struggled with social anxiety and find any silences in a conversation really awkward. I start to think that the person I am talking to thinks I am boring, weird and unable to hold a conversation. However, I have started to embrace ‘awkward’ silences and actually think it’s a bit of a flex if you can pull it off without getting embarrassed. After all, it’s better than saying something really stupid. You may not feel comfortable in the moment but the person next to you doesn’t need to know that.

My ADHD brain in its full form. Thoughts all over the shop and nothing to help calm my mind. Sometimes I feel like a prisoner to my ADHD but the more awareness that is being raised about it, the more normal I feel. Finally, I don't feel alone.

I always loved being the life and soul of the party but the downside became a general feeling that no one I came across in life was taking me seriously. My boss would ask completely unprofessional questions during review meetings. I felt like guys would see dating me as a fun and light relief between serious relationships. I felt like nobody realised it was possible that I could have my own s*** going on. As I’ve grown I have realised how much not feeling heard and understood affects my mental health. I have since worked on being a lot more honest about how I’m feeling and not turning everything into a joke as a defence mechanism.

I made this in rehab a few years back. We are all products of our past but whilst I was in rehab, I finally found a group of people that I could relate to. They are my family and we are the 'Children of the Funk United"!!

I have had a lot of problems growing up, as a result of childhood trauma I think. This illustration is a depiction of my inner child, demonstrating to me how important it is to remember the good times I had as a child.

I think these were me thinking about how much effort it takes to smile when you’re not feeling like it, contorting yourself to be something you’re not in that moment.

I was looking through some journals and found these. I always feel sad on my birthday, or Christmas, or new years even….big events where we’re meant to feel a certain way and the conflict of how our feelings don’t always align with what the world expects us or wants us to feel, which only complicates the feelings even more.

I created this piece during a phase of feeling incredibly exposed and vulnerable whilst helping somebody else through a difficult time. A time that was equally as difficult for me, but I became the escape route for the other persons pain. The spaceman is walking on the core of another person, not the moon - and I figured this is how we all live at times. We enter situations totally unarmored and become the grounds for other people to find happiness again.

This piece is about feeling burnt out from masking and people pleasing as someone with late diagnosed ADHD. Getting my diagnosis at 30 changed my life and I'm still making changes so that I can exist more comfortably in this world knowing that I am neurodivergent. I feel like I've been shedding layers of shame and unworthiness that I've been holding onto all my life. I am learning how to create and maintain boundaries, I wish I had known how important they were sooner. Drawing my emotions has been a helpful way for me to process what I'm feeling along with self care, guilt free rest and self acceptance.

This piece shows how I sometimes feel when a rush of anxiety comes over me. It can feel like all of my emotions rush through me at the same time and bubble up. But drawing out the way I feel and portraying my mind through my artwork always settles me.

‘Glimpse’ represents the duality of how I feel and what I’m thinking vs how I’m seen and what I present to others.

Outwardly confident.
Inwardly uncomfortable, self critical.
At odds with my interior monologue.
Don’t share, internalise.
My emotions aren’t important.
I’ve always felt like a burden.

By interconnecting two differently positioned figures, one more intimate, reserved. The other confrontational, the inner voice is physically actualised and seen weaving through a confident and more prominent being.
By creating this piece through the medium of dry point etching, the lattice like structure of the cross hatched marks allow for a visual fluidity between the two separate figural elements, merging the halves into a whole overall being showing both internal and external.

This work is the culmination of recent exploration and research into the dry point medium; breaking down and analysing works by Anders Leonard Zorn, Rembrandt and other prominent figures that used Etching to create artwork.

This piece is a way point in my progression with this medium and allows me to see where I am and what’s possible with further practice and experimentation.

The real me, what I really look like is all in my head.

Created this 3D graphic as open self practice which ended up in a serie of graphics I started to make on a daily in a very confusion period. Felt like I was writing a journal but with designs. Curious was the interpretations of my friends some see the sea in it and some see a rib cage, maybe I unconsciously wanted to express the "waves" I was going through inside.

A blackwork interpretation of one of my favourite paintings, I think the look of sorrow and emptiness speaks volumes

My designs want to focus on a positive outlook. There is a way to live with bdd by embracing one's uniqueness. I chose bold, cheerful colours and a handwritten font where every letter is unique.

This illustration shows how BDD drips poison into our brains and convinces us of it’s lies. Ever detail has a meaning, for example the line on the forehead represents a heartbeat, I have a preoccupation of a line thats’s on my face. The heartbeat represents the anxiety levels that BDD brings when it’s at it’s worst.

Fascia/interconnected tissue study reflecting on personal Trauma following Terrorist Attack, London Bridge, November 2019, 7year relationship ending and Lockdown.

This illustration represents my daily 20 minute walk outside wearing sunglasses as a barrier to the world whatever the weather.

This is a collage piece inspired by propaganda posters. I have modified this piece from my master’s final project ‘unREAL’, which explored beauty ideals and the negative effects that social media has on our self esteem. We are bombarded everyday with “perfect” images of beauty that is often edited and curated. We then hold ourselves to unattainable standards of beauty that are not real, which make us feel as though we are not enough.

When I'm having a particularly bad time with my BDD, these are the thoughts that play on a loop and often all at the same time. It feels constant and exhausting. I chose to handwrite it in different colours and fonts because at the end of the day, even though it is the BDD talking, it's still my voice. My words and thoughts. This felt like the most obvious and natural way to represent that.

Compared to the other mental health issues I struggle with, I feel most shame about having anorexia/BDD and (previously, now recovered) substance use disorder (SUD), so I knew I wanted to combine body image and addiction in my design. BARE is a parody on the US governments anti-drug campaign “DARE” that ran from the mid 1980s to early 2000s, which garnered widespread criticism due to its inefficacy at preventing people from using drugs as well as its judgemental and sometimes racist approach. I knew I wanted to do a parody because it represents what it all looks like to me on paper - at the end of the day you have to find ways to laugh about it or you’ll just cry. And staying positive is so important for recovery!

I want the title of Bodies Against Restrictive Expectations to bring to mind how we are all just a body of varying shape, size and colour, and our body is nothing but a physical vessel that allows us to experience life and express ourselves. As long as you feel like yourself in your body, no one has the right to tell you you’re doing anything wrong. Judgement from yourself and others is something you feel often as an addict and sufferer of BDD, and I believe that part of the reason that we feel shame around having these mental illnesses is because rather than compassionate public education, governments instead push harmful stigma in the form of programmes such as DARE. DARE promoted addicts to be worthless and immoral, and aided in disproportionately criminalising marginalised communities.

When I feel ashamed about these illnesses, it makes me feel angry that people like me have been harmed by society’s unrealistic and unnecessary expectations. It makes me angry that the amount of money spent on DARE went towards implying that those who struggle are weak, rather than towards educating people about how common mental health is and how to cope with it. I want my T-shirt to be a reminder of the skyrocketing rates of mental illness among todays youth and to highlight how DARE’s stigmatising messaging prevented research into psychological treatments using compounds like cannabis, LSD, MDMA and ketamine, the benefits of which are only now being discovered in today’s post-War on Drugs era.

This is a collage piece inspired by propaganda posters. I have modified this piece from my master’s final project ‘unREAL’, which explored beauty ideals and the negative effects that social media has on our self esteem. We are bombarded everyday with “perfect” images of beauty that is often edited and curated, and even altered with cosmetic procedures. We then hold ourselves to unattainable standards of beauty that are not real, which make us feel as though we are not enough. Beauty ideals are a result of a capitalist, patriarchal society. They create the ideals, and then create the means in which we are supposed to achieve them. We pluck, shave, tweak, enhance, shape. We physically change ourselves desperately reaching for an ideal that doesn’t exist. This piece represents the oppressive beauty practices that have become normalised and easily accessible in our everyday lives.