Like all of our waterways, my local river is, by any measure, a compromised body of water. Sewage overflows from water companies that have paid out billions in dividends while infrastructure collapses and untreated waste pours into rivers across the country. The water I paddle through has been violated. Treated as a resource to be exploited, a cheap receptacle for our collective waste and corporate malfeasance.

We have words for treating a body as a receptacle. For using it without consent. For assuming it exists to absorb whatever you choose to put into it.

I think about this as a I paddle. The same logic that says a natural body exists for profit, for convenience, for exploitation is not entirely unrelated to the logic that makes the footpath at dusk feel dangerous. The assumption that bodies are there to be moved through, used, and left.

And yet. I am still out here. In the compromised, shit-filled, beautiful river. Because it gives me a freedom I can’t find on land.

I just deleted Instagram off my phone. Again. I realised the rising panic I experienced every time I opened Instagram had no where else to rise. I was full.

Full panic. Horror. At everything happening in the world? Yes, always.

But also the disconnect between telling myself that I am ‘creatively composting’ my writing, while also feeling increasingly disappointed my face doesn’t resemble AI/ filtered faces. The perception gap is real.

It’s also the start of September and the teaching year and I have a sense that I need to achieve all the projects in my head before December ends.

When my babies were born I knew they were mine in a really primal sense. But when I looked at them - just looked at them - they were little strangers, otherworldly creatures, whose faces were a mystery. They didn’t look like mine. But my god, I knew them by smell. And I knew their cry from the very first moment. It wrenched at my heart and pulled at me in a way no other sound has ever done before or since. And I knew them by touch. Just exactly how my baby felt in my arms, their bodily heft, the shape of the elbows that I once felt from within.

When children are growing up in a world of AI-generated images and deepfakes and algorithmic feeds designed to keep them scrolling and authoritarian governments erase inconvenient histories we need the humanities and arts more than ever.

A few weeks ago I finished a developmental edit on a partial draft of a memoir. The author had approached me for input, partly because they felt the subject matter - grief - might be too raw.

It’s a strange and particular privilege to read 26,000 words written from someone else’s heart. An offering in the form of a sustained and intimate account of someone else’s life.

How I stopped panicking and started letting things rot.

In June 2026, I’m running Picturing Mother, a two-part live online art history intensive exploring these themes.

Across two extended sessions, we will trace representations of motherhood from ancient imagery through to contemporary art, combining visual analysis with cultural and historical context.

The course is designed to be both intellectually rigorous and accessible. No prior knowledge of art history is required.

When artist Janine Bächle became a parent, her camera was one of the ways she processed the experience. Her new photo book, Becoming Parents, is an intimate, tender and visceral look at the physical and emotional transformations that happen when people cross the threshold into parenthood.

I had the joy of writing an essay for the book, and in the process, I got to speak with Janine about what it means to document such an intimate and universal shift. In our conversation, we talked about vulnerability, bodily changes, taboos, and why motherhood is still seen as a niche subject.

Earlier this year I was invited to write the text for a photo-book Becoming Parents by artist Janine Bächle. Her autobiographical photographs, from pregnancy through to two births and beyond are extraordinary.

As Janine says of the project,

Within this autobiographical and long term series, I have documented in a raw manner the entire range of emotions within my everyday family life. Through observing my children, my partner and my body changes, I have questioned what it means to be a parent in the current time of ‘attachment parenting’ and without support from a big family or ‘village’ to help.

The ideas and sentences are still coming. I know what I want to write, but I somehow can’t find it in me to commit them to the page. But instead of guilt, I’m letting those words circle me without trying to catch them, trying to trust that they’ll land when the time is right.