silence

A Creative Sketchbook, Dec 2025

| Sheree
My creative sketchbook
My creative sketchbook rules

I’m not sure how my creative sketchbook differs from my visual journal. Intention maybe.

Perhaps, I think , I’m attempting to develop my art practice within a designated space. A study maybe.

I haven’t really been in the thick of my art making practice since the preparation for my Baltic exhibition back in 2022-3.

This was quickly followed with the writings and (re)drafts of Darkling, my poetry/hybrid collection published in October 2024.

After this 2025 has been a period of extended rest and refusal.

But something has been niggling me. The desire to create with paint again. the desire to play without expectations and outcomes/ products.

I’ve just scratched the itch through scrolling through Pinterest. Adding another abstract or landscape painting to a board that I’ll probably not look at again.

But it satisfied this niggling feeling. Until it didn’t.

It was going back into the classroom. Completing a few days of supply that pushed me over the edge.

The time I gave away for money. The time I’d lost pursuing my own pursuits. And realising that I wasn’t pursuing all the pursuits I wanted to pursue in the time I had/have.

So out came a creative sketchbook, inspired by the 30 days sketchbook challenge created by Cheryl Taves over at Insight Creative.

This is as much as I’m willing to share for now about the challenge, my creative sketchbook, processes and insights.

One of my rules is that it’s just for my eyes only. I want to see how this rule changes my practice. I want to create without fear but with curiosity. I want to give myself all the freedom without worrying about what others will think or say or comment on.

It’s not like I’m hanging on other people’s responses and reactions but I have gotten into a habit of just sharing anything and everything on my blog and I’m curious to see what happens when I keep things to myself.

Just for my eyes, heart, and soul only.

So far I’m enjoying the process of the challenge and I’m reflecting and paying attention to what makes my heart sing, what’s my creative vocabulary, what pushes my energies.

Do doubt whatever I explore within my creative sketchbook will be showing up in everything that I create. In everything who I {BE}. For sure.

what can i do? what can i say?

| Sheree

Unconsciously I set myself the task of being creative everyday. A good way of marking this practice, was and still is, turning up here on this blog and posting something. Anything. A word, a quote, an image, an essay, an epiphany.

Some days, I’ve not had the time or energy or bandwidth to create anything, other days when I’ve felt this way, I’ve still turned up and done something. Anything. I’ve wanted to bring in some consistency within a world where consistency is irrelevant and pointless in the grand scheme of things. When the world is on fire, when Palestinians are dying of starvation and gunfire. When anti-immigration riots erupted once more in the UK. When tropical storms kill people in the Philippines. And when Syria returns to bloodshed. The list could go on of more countries and peoples around the world suffering at the hands of others, who do not see them as human or care about them.

I get sick of hearing the news. Watching the news. Seeing the headlines. I look away. I look away because I can and then chastise myself for dong so. There’s something in witnessing it all, even though it hurts my soul. What can I do? What can I say?

I get frustrated with all the hypocrisy I witness. The double standards. The lack of justice. People saying we’re doing this to them because we’ve been persecuted for so long so have a right, or are justified in persecuting other people now. I’m a white man and I rape women and children, but I’m protesting about (illegal) immigrants coming over here and raping our women and children. Everything is operating within this world to keep a few in power and wealth at the expense of other people deemed inferior and dispensable.

I hate hate. I can’t stand it. I see it in the screwed up faces of people hauling abuse at vulnerable people. It’s been there within the marrow of their bones for centuries. Grown white adults, hurling abuse at little black children. Not seeing them as children but as beasts, beasts to destroy. It breaks my heart and disgusts me, but what can I say? What can I do?

I can stop myself from feeing powerless. I can stop my handwringing, and getting frustrated with myself and use this energy otherwise. I can make art to bring about change. No matter how small that change, starting from myself and vibrating out.

I can create stories of an imagined alternative, better, other world. I can create zines which challenge and refuse what has already been refused of us. I can blog about my own experiences in order to connect with others. I can paint/ print posters to raise awareness and change the messages of hate to love and hope. I can create community and create change together, one stitch, one word, one voice at a time. I can create poetry to create conversation. I can self-care so I can in turn community-care. I can donate time, money, resources to a cause I believe in and that is bringing about a better society. I can lean more into mutual aid to divest from racial capitalism.

I can keep showing up here, craving out a safe and brave space on the internet that is liberatory worldmaking, on my own terms.

who has #womensrights?

| Sheree
Neil Kenlock, 1970, Resistence Exhibition, Steve McQueen, 2025

In March the United Nations issued a report about Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinian women since October 2023.

Those who shout long and hard about #womensrights have said fuck all about this abuse.

Perpetuating a system of oppression through gender-based violence and undermining self-determination is not coincidental.

But those who profess to be standing up for #womensrights say nothing.

Sexual and gender-based violence perpetuated across the Occupied Palestinian Territory is a strategy of war by Israel to demoralise and destroy Palestinians.

Those who shout long and hard about #womensrights have said fuck all about this abuse.

Israeli forces have destroyed sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities across Gaza. Medical support and equipment for safe pregnancies, postnatal care and neonatal care are decimated.

But those who profess to be standing up for #womensrights say nothing.

Women’s and girl’s reproductive right and autonomy as well as their right to life, health and dignity have been erased.

And yet these people, mostly white women, such as JK Rowling, who harp on about #womensrights and the so called threats posed by transgender people, say nothing about the Palestinian women and girls who are subjected to violence right now.

The deliberate starvation by Israel of Palestinian people has a devastating effect on pregnant women resulting in anaemia, malnutrition, miscarriages, stillbirths and undernourished newborns as lactating women cannot produce enough milk.

And yet these people here for #womensrights say nothing.

It would seem that those who claim to be champions of #womenrights pick and choose who has rights as women, fuck it, as human beings.

when the world is burning, what can we do?

| Sheree

when the world is burning, what can we do? we can make fucking art. that’s what we can do!

“You can’t help it. An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.”

― Nina Simone

sometimes i feel so small and insignificant. and what can i do that would make a difference? the world is burning. people are being exterminated. genocide over and over around the world, not just Gaza. Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo. genocide is history repeating itself. just in the last few days, a landmark Aboriginal-led inquiry has found that british colonists committed genocide against australia’s Indigenous population in victoria in the 1830s. why has it taken so long for this to be vindicated when the people themselves know when they have been dehumanised and persecuted? nations/ governments commit genocide because they think they can get away with it. no one seems to hold them to account.

what can I do when, as an artist, when the world has gone to shit? make art. that’s what i can do and that’s what were supposed to do.

it’s out duty to reflect the times. but the world is making it really hard for us not to do this. the world is working really hard to silence us. to suppress us. to keep us operating on fear and to box us in. all these social media platforms are owned by oligarchs who own and control us. we are discouraged from telling the truth. and when we tell the truth is is filtered, distorted and manipulated.

and yet. i remember. we need art. people need art. art helps use process our feelings and emotions. through art we can learn, heal and feel. art helps us to be in touch with ourselves and each other. art connects. art helps us reflect.

art gives me the words or the language for the things i didn’t know i needed to express to process to reflect to share. here in my little space on tin-ternet, i’m not bought or controlled. i’m not silenced or afraid. i embrace my duty as an artist to make art by any means necessary.

i hope you will join me in creating and reflecting the times. let’s not sit in our fears but connect in our strengths.

The Sinners Series – 004

| Sheree

You know I love the movie, Sinners. I’m onto my fifth watching of it.

One of my favourite songs within the movie is this one Dangerous sung by Hailee Steinfeld. I could rage on for hours about this song; it’s melody and words and underlining beat. But for now, I’m taking the word dangerous and running with it.

Within Sinners, what can be seen as dangerous is the invasion of vampires, a life or death situation. What could also be seen as dangerous is a community of sharecroppers having a safe space to listen to music and dance and eat and drink on their own terms. To be free. This could be seen as dangerous by the white supremacy culture they are living under.

For me what I see as dangerous are the white men who are still running around in their white hoods, calling themselves the brotherhood, the protectors of white women and democracy and who do whatever is takes to keep the black people( they do not use this nice a term for such people) in line even if it means killing them all.

These white men in hoods, the Ku Klux Klan, deal out justice as they see fit, creating terror as the deterrent to black people thinking of stepping out of line. And that could be just breathing.

These white men could meet you on the street one day and be burning down your house the very next day. But you wouldn’t know who they be. You know the enemy is a white man but it could be the smiling face neighbour who hides behind the hood, concealing their identity and cause havoc with no repercussions or justice or revenge on them. To live in this sense of fear is unimaginable.

Today these Federal Officials and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) marshals who are abusing their power, gifted by the Trump administration, to take people, children as well, from their homes, schools, work, off the streets and detain them, saying they are illegal, deport them, torture them for no reason except being seen as an ‘alien’ because they are brown and black are no better than the KKK. They wear the masks. They cover their faces. Conceal their identities and commit the crimes. The brown and black citizens of these communities are not committing any crimes except attempting to survive and thrive, living their lives.

Why cover your faces if you believe in what you are doing? Why conceal your identity if you are doing what is right, following the law? Why hide if you are proud of your actions?

This is dangerous. White men or white baby-men again have been emboldened and empowered to run havoc through our communities in the name of the law. Believing that they are doing what’s right in terms of some warped sense of superiority and the belief that they have a right to do so.

This is dangerous and has to be stopped. How? That is what we have to work out.

Running Scared, No More

| Sheree

Let’s be scared. Let’s demonise people.

This is the message sweeping across countries at the moment, around the world, as we continue to move further to the right in terms of politics and governing people. Suppressing people and voices.

Thinking about my weekend in London at the Defeating Narratives of Division conference hosted by the Ella Baker School of Organising, and coming home to see peaceful protests in L.A. around the over stretching arms of Federal Officials and illegal immigration raids on communities being portrayed as chaos and unruly and needs to be stopped with military force. Trump, man!

What the fuck is happening right now? What false narratives fuelled by fear and intimidation are catching like wildfire and are taking hold? What is happening to democracy and fairness and justice?

I too am scared. I’ve been told by some to have fear and anxiety and start panicking in order to take action. Time is running out. Passing on this narrative of fear is making us on the so-called left no better than those on the right whose fuel is fear.

We have to be pushing back against these fears. Not disallowing them but acknowledging them and choosing to fuel our movement with love and solidarity and joy. We can come together as we have the power and spread a message of love and welcome and togetherness and there is no way that message can be twisted or used against us.

It is plain to see that communities who stand together, even if from different cultures and races and heritages, are powerful and those who are crooked and authoritarian are scared of this. Scared of us taking back our power and saying no, enough!

I’ll be writing more on this in the weeks to come. But for now I just had to mark this moment of disgust at what is happening around the world but how there is much to be celebrating and reinforcing and elevating. Stories of love and solidarity and people taking back their agency and power. Thinking of Burkina Faso here and other African nations who are standing up and saying enough is enough.

But all in good time, and for me ‘good’ time is slow time. Taking the time to bring about lasting change on our own terms.

More to follow.

Find the Good – Day 18

| Sheree

I’ve been thinking of moving to the Highlands, buying a small cottage by a loch and swim every morning.

There’s a river too, that haunts the glen, between my cottage and the mountains. I feel it, breathing within the shadow of mountains.

I know this is not just a pipe dream. I know someone who’s done it, made the move across the border, living a blessed life.

I’ve been thinking of an open fire where I’d bake bread with the sun rise and when ready sit sit out on the porch with thick slices, warm and buttered. Dripping butter and the air smelling like home.

My home.

I’m thinking there’s one village store miles away. I walk every other day for exercise. On the way, I bird spot. Blackbird, moorhen, blue tit, eagle.

Small talk with the store owner might be difficult after long moments of silence in my cottage by the loch. In the silence I can hear myself better.

Being a water woman and a mountain woman, I will welcome the solitude and the haunting rolling out before me as nothing would hold me back.

An ars poetica poem* – Day 15

| Sheree

“I write only because

There is a voice within me

That will not be still.” ― Sylvia Plath

Poetry is where we are ourselves – Elizabeth Alexander

i try to connect beauty using words as healers of possibilities from the state within, the voice, a teacher, a sage, where my poetry winters, where I can see the ‘I’ like a clearing through the trees, where imagination lingers inch wide mile deep, conjuring for change and connection. i try language, not to trick or demonstrate my intellect, but to spark simple, stretching blossoms into ‘we’ rather than ‘them and us’. from the state without, i’m a beast, caged and muzzled. swallowed. cornered and supposedly cowered, i come out writing, wading into dangerous waters, owning my imagination to practice potential futures.

*“An ars poetica poem is a poem examining the role of poets themselves as subjects, their relationships to the poem, and the act of writing.” —Poets.org

Creating Sanctuary

| Sheree





*not so mush a trigger warning but saying it anyways!


I am worthy of consent.
I am safe.
I can heal from sexual trauma. –  Lyvonne Briggs

I’m writing. Or is it rambling? I’m not sure. It’s just that I’m reading at the moment. I’m in my cave (bed) hibernating and I’m reading so many different books. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry and there’s a cross over with what’s happening within my life with my reading ( Does that happen to you?). There’s an echo or a reinforcement for the things that are causing me grief at the moment, worrying the wound as I read and rest. 

So writing things out, going long is a way of making sense of it all in the moment. It’s a way of gaining some kind of clarity for now. Not thinking of the future but thinking of gathering the threads at this moment to made make a something out of this mess of yarns.

My mum died when I was 27 years old. I’d just become a mother the year before. I’ve been hearing about the ‘mother wound’ lately. I’m not sure if I understand it completely. But when I hear it, I don’t jump into definitions and theories. For me it’s simply means when my mum died and left me to cope alone. Selfish I know. But I feel as is she left a gaping, bleeding wound that festers and hurts when I worry it. When I press on it, inspect it with my touch.

This morning, following my morning routine, in bed reading (with coffee skipped ahead this morning) I’m reading Sensual Faith: The Art of Coming Home to Your Body by Lyvonne Briggs. I’m reading a section called ‘Surthrivors’ a term Briggs created to try and capture how she was feeling, living after male sexual violence. She felt ‘survivor’ was too flat to describe/ define her experience when she was living/doing what she loved studying theology and religion, in community with loving people and was an acclaimed spoken word and slam poet. “I wasn’t just surviving, I was thriving!” Briggs wrote, hence pointing the more accurate term, ‘Surthrivor’. 
I love it when we Black women bend and twist language, divest from the standard to better express/ more fully express our feelings and experiences. That’s creative fugitivity for you (thank you Dal).

Briggs goes on to talk about how she got into the ministry so she could change how the church handles sexual abuse, not very well,  as there is a silence around it. Or they blame demons instead of the actually men. I’m not here to talk about male sexual abuse. I’m not her to talk about the church. I’m not a religious person. I was brought up saying my prayers. I remember a black bible, creased leather, brought from Trinidad and Tobago with my dad when he stowed away to England. This black bible sat toad-like in the teak sideboard of my childhood living room. West Indian style living room, I may add. 
I gave up believing in a ‘God’ when my daddy died when I was 9 years old. I’ve now come around to the idea that we are Gods/ Goddesses ourselves, inside us. I’m spiritual rather than religious. So I’m not sure why I’m reading this book. 

I lie. Yes I do know why I’m reading Sensual Faith. I followed a trail to this book left by Christina Cleveland and God is a Blackwoman. But also because of the subheading of Sacred Faith: The Art of Coming Home to Your Body, is a journey I always seem to be on. 

Anyway. Back to the reading this morning which went on to discuss the worship centre in a church is called the ‘sanctuary’. When you the word ‘sanctuary’, does anyone else think of Quasimodo? ‘Sanctuary, sanctuary!’

A ‘sanctuary’ is a safe or holy place. I wrote a poem titled ‘sanctuary’ and it was about my mum. My mum’s home, body, arms. When she was alive, it was her I went to for safe harbour.  I didn’t realise until she was gone. It has come a way for me to practice mothering my own children, through sanctuary for them. Once my mum died, I lost who and where I could return to for safety. I lost my home, my sanctuary when she died and I suppose I’ve been searching for sanctuary ever since, looking outside myself, looking for it in others ( husband for one!)

I don’t how long I’ve been in battle with my being, with my body, chastising her for not being enough. But also for being too much. Too fat. Too broad, too Black. But over the last few years, eyes open, something has been changing or shifting within me and how I view, treat and talk to my body.
.
Maybe that’s where my mum did me a disservice and where I’m making amends with my kids. I’m not sure she taught me how to find sanctuary within myself, within my own body.

Monday nights I dread. 
Not always. Just the last few months as I complete my level 3 diploma in counselling skills. I’m not jesting that I hate turning up for this course. And I never use ‘hate’ as a word usually, always thinking it’s too strong a word for a feeling. Too final without any redeeming features. But this is where we’ve got to with this course. 

And it wasn’t always the case. I could blame the dark, cold nights I have to turn up for 3 hours of lecturing and talking in an empty, sterile office block. I could blame the electric fluorescent lighting that flickers and buzzes and can give me a bad head. But I would be lying. I’m here to be wide open and honest. So here goes!

This course is taking away pieces of my soul, week after week. And I’m not ashamed to say that I have contemplated dropping out week after week, researching for alternatives. I  even enrolled on a supplementary course, decolonising counselling, that would tend to all the damage this course is doing, but I had to withdraw from that due to costs and timings. 

If you’ve ever studied counselling and therapy, you’ll know that everything; theories and tools and practices are all taken from dead white guys. Dead white guys acting like Gods (and I don’t mean the internal Gods I’m just mentioned). White male, usually heterosexual and middle class theorists who pontificate that they know everything about what’s happening in everybody’s mental health. They have the solutions to make us feel/ do /be better. As it’s always the individual’s fault and can be traced back to their childhood, their mother? Bullshit!

It hurts to be fed this shite every Monday. In the beginning I pushed back and attempted to decolonise the teaching, the theory, the responses. Bringing in other theorists and arguments. Being the only Black face in the class, girl has to represent. 

Until we got to week 9, we were exploring different types of power within the counsellor and client relationship. Power roles within the counselling arena. After a discussion, we were being presented with a list of ‘Further key aspects of power or perceived power’. And yes the list was not an exhaustive list and things could be added, the tutor said. This list did not include ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘culture’, and I voiced it as such. My comment was laughed at and dismissed as, ‘there’s always one’. 

Always one who has to comment on what’s missing from the list? Or always one who has to bring up race? Who knows! I just know how this comment made me feel.  Know your audience I say or was I being put into my place? This response indicated to me that this input, which a fundamentally the way white supremacy culture wields power through the hierarchy of the races. It’s the sea that we’re swimming in and to not mention is the usual state of affairs.  This interaction indicated to me that this was never going to be on this course’s agenda. Me continuing to challenge the whitewashing of counselling and therapy, me constantly remarking on the culture that we’re operating in wasn’t enlightening my fellow students or suggesting that they become more aware of their ( and my own) unconscious biases.  I realised I was just creating issues where they never saw issues. Problems where there are no problems.  As race and racism is only a problem when there’s a Black person in the room. It’s Black people who have an issue with race as whiteness isn’t a race, right? Whiteness is a given. 

After week 9, and tonight was week 15, I’ve silenced myself. I’ve disengaged from the course, no longer contributing. I turn up and get my attendance and keep my thoughts and comments and feelings to myself. I’m not giving anything of myself anymore to the group, to the course within the face to face sessions as I’ve received the message it’s not welcome, it’s not of value, it’s not relevant. I do not intend to waste my energy and heart and soul on this experience. 

This hurts me.
I’m making sanctuary for myself. I’m making this experience safe for myself. I’m keeping myself safe within myself, within my body as being in that classroom is no longer safe for me. And to explain that to them, I wouldn’t bother, as they wouldn’t get it. The can’t get it and it would also involve them listening to me, and me being heard, which ain’t happening.

I’m creating sanctuary for myself, within my body and its a practice. I’m using a self-soothing approach, self-talking, loving compassionate approach when I experience something that is harming, hurting, traumatic. I’m letting myself know, like that little girl inside me who needed to be loved and kept safe, I’m stroking my own chest over my heart and saying to her, saying to myself, ‘ You are love, Sheree. I’ve got you I understand why you are feeling unsafe. But I’ve got you. You’re dafe now.”
I’m mothering myself. I’m making myself safe. I’m making myself sanctuary.