I applied to Arts Council England for a Developing Your Creative Practice grant mid 2025. It was unsuccessful.
Undeterred, I resubmitted it under the project grant scheme. I was notified of being successful just before Christmas 2025.
Practicing Creative Fugitivity is its name, and it involves researching fugitive practice. It also involves reading in community Fugitive Feminism by Akwugo Emejulu.
A study circle of women of the global majority.
When did you first learn that you were a non-human?
The question that opens the first chapter of the text Fugitive Feminism.
A question that hits me in my gut with its open, blatant honesty and curiosity.
A question which niggles at a truth that I’ve not wanted to face up to as it would mean that I’ve spent a lifetime trying to demonstrate, prove, live up to an unattainable category of being human.
Human as a category was never created to include someone like me within it.
Human = Whiteness
Human v Non-Human
You can’t have the light without the dark.
All constructs to create hierarchies. A hierarchy where white, EuroAmerican, able bodied, middle class, cis-gendered, college educated and suburban men reign supreme. Superior.
Conceptual Other. No Humans Involved. The Lack of the Human.
Black women. Outside. Out Outside.
Our exclusion determines the borders/ boundaries of the human.
But consider this …
If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.
Combahee River Collective
Where the excitement lies for me and others, is once we realise that Black women cannot be human, then with the support of this book in community, let’s consider what if ‘human’ cannot and should not be reclaimed?
Speculate. Speculation. Speculative.
How might we divest from the human?
That the non-human Other actually decentres the human. Move beyond human to something otherwise.
Something else.
Becoming ( something else).
Thinking of how to be/ how to live beyond the binary of human v non-human could produce the means of improving our community/society/our planet.
Centring the human ( v non-human/ othering all else) has got us into the shit we’re facing now in terms of ecological disaster.
Finding a way to decentre the human, divest from what this concept / construction means and how it operates has to be the way forward.
Fugitive Feminism is the doorway into another way of being. A portal into an alternative world built upon the Black Feminist politics of liberation.
The path ahead is not clear or defined. It’s slippery and ambiguous. It’s experiential and experimental. Yet full of possibilities. Caring not harmful possibilities.
Speculative. Suggestive. Spacious.
And it starts and continues with the act of refusal. Refusal of the way things are right now.
Refusal of being defined by others to fit into their definition of humanity ( whiteness).
Refusal of being extracted and exploited for the benefits of a few.
Refusal of being non-human.
Refusal of being outside of humanity.
Refusal of the whole concept of human/whiteness/ fascist.
Refusal of these limitations when i, we, i and i can be something else beyond humans.
This weekend we’ve had the light. Having the light with a bit of warmth makes a difference. To the mood. To the outlook.
This March I’m seizing the light and going to work behind the scenes on a project I’ve been putting off but one which is close to my heart.
I’ve been divorcing myself from big tech, rich oligarch run social media and platforms. I’ve been going more analogue than digital. And I’ve definitely been refusing AI.
This month I’m working on my archives. The archives of this website. These blogposts. So that my legacy, this work and practice lives on beyond WordPress, beyond myself. Beyond the internet.
I’m taking ownership of my creativity and taking records. Backing things up, creating a trace of my presence here which isn’t dependant on technology.
This is gonna take some time, so I’ve taking the time away from posting here to archives there.
I go to my local probably about once a week if not more. I was brought up next to a library, in Bradford and in Newburn. They were places I could go to for some sense of freedom and adventure.
The librarians knew me and would recommend books to me and events. They wouldn’t rush me, I was welcome to stay as long as I wanted.
Today, I love to pop in to see the book sales at my local libraries. As I have a few on my doorstep now. I flit between them, collecting worn and torn books that I repurpose.
I was brought up to know it was ‘wrong’ to write in books. They were sacred in our home. Probably because we were poor and if we bought books, usually from the indoor market in town, we knew it was money we couldn’t afford to spend on books. But my parents spent it anyway, as they valued books, learning and education. It was our way out of poverty.
I wonder what they would say now, if they saw what I did to books?
10p is all I pay for big, colourful children’s books, withdrawn from library stock. I have to feel the paper first though before I buy them. Even if only 10p, too shiny the page and the paint won’t grip it as well. The paint just swirls around and doesn’t stick.
I like my pages rough and matt finished. Ready to absorb whatever I put down on it.
This sketchbook was my side hustle for the last month. Side hustle to my main creative sketchbook. Here I just lay down colour and see what happens.
I like when what’s underneath the paint bleeds through. I like when the different layers of paint and pencil and pen bleeds through to the surface too.
It’s like a palimpsest. The marks beneath is the feeling I’m after. The haunting, the trace, the evidence of time and the passage of time. The archive is present now.
A film where injustice is tackled head on and over time is recognise and overturned.
Just Mercy, a film starring Michael B Jordan and Jamie Foxx, co-written and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, is one such film.
I return to this film , which is a true story about the wrongful incarceration of Walter McMillan and how Bryan Stevenson worked tirelessly for his release, a lot when I want to feel hope. When I want to feel that all is not lost and that there is another way, or option. There’s always something else/other/more we can do/say{BE}.
The point is, not to give up. To not lose hope. To not lose love.
This extract from the script is a prison scene when Jamie Foxx playing Walter McMillan, on death row for a murder he didn’t commit, is trying to calm down his friend Herbert Richardson played by Rob Morgan whose execution is the very next day.
“Look at them pine trees that been growin’ since way before we was born, and gonna keep on growin’ way after we gone. They been through all the same shit we been through and more, but they still dancing in the breeze.”
This part stays with me. This right here is what sticks to my bones. That wisdom from nature. That guidance from nature.
Even while going through shit, and going through shit from time, they still be dancing.
Yes, to this. Yes to still living through it all on our own terms, in our own ways. and experiencing/ creating/holding on to the joy.
Living Wild Studios 