These photos are the remaining pieces of ‘Whatever Is Silenced Will Clamour To Be Heard’, a series I made in 2017 for my photography course in college. The title’s borrowed from the pages of Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, and I made the whole photo and video series on my iPhone 6, because I didn’t have a camera.

I wish I still had evidence of everything I made: there was once a ragged red dress and tattered fabric masks, safety-pinned and handstitched with inkjet-printed fabric versions of the photos.

There was also a video piece: my hands performing strange dissections on red roses, armed with a scalpel, sewing kit, and a bottle of red nail polish.

These four photos are the only surviving pieces I could scavenge after nine years.

‘Whatever Is Silenced Will Clamour To Be Heard’ will always be a series I hold close to my heart, because in its petals I can see the deepest roots of everything I’ve ever made since: Ragged stitches and scars, sharp edges, a needle-gleam and flowers with teeth and plants that scream.

‘There is something subversive about this garden… a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard, though silently. … heat rises from the flowers themselves, you can feel it…’

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale