WELCOME TO NEW VENUS / WE ARE MADE FROM THE SHATTERED STARS
The capitalist-patriarchal planet is uninhabitable. Rotting meat and fragile glass towers stab the burning sky. Earth herself is being torn apart by hate, by a lust for power, by wanting control over everything and everyone they refuse to understand. They’ll annihilate everything and everyone in sight rather than face the consequences of their own ego.
But on the edges, in the margins, a place called New Venus still lives and breathes.
New Venus is a root system, a mycelium network: her flowers blossom from the scorched earth and cracked concrete, her teeth sharpened.
The fluids of angry wombs have hit the boiling point. We won’t let our fury sit in our throats any more, won’t choke back the bitter taste. We scream a liquid horror, a rage, a joy that will split the burning sky.
We’re still here. Their petrol-fuelled violence will never destroy us.
Welcome to New Venus.
We are made from the shattered stars.
‘Flag of New Venus’
2026
Marker pen on tea towel
Can you feel something shifting?
Blossoming up from the scorched earth,
out from the cracked concrete,
their heads not petals, but teeth.
Tongues are sharpening.
The FLUIDS of angry wombs have hit the boiling point.
Welcome To New Venus.
We are made from the shattered stars.
‘diamond-fragments (all the places where my heart lives)’
2026
Mixed textile pocket shrine
Go and stand at the crossroads just before dawn, where the frozen ground meets the heavy grey shadow of the midwinter sky. You’ll feel the other world behind the mist, just out of reach.
Whisper to the scavengers that live here: the crows, foxes, red kites.
Ask them to help you find the things that were stolen from you. Ask them to help you find your way home.
And if you listen, the scavengers will answer:
All those small, bright things,
they’re still there, right under the surface of your skin.
So you dig out those diamond-fragments with your fingernails, stitch them back together piece by piece. You wrap them in red fabric, hold them close to your heart and promise to never let them go.
Each stitch holds another scar together. Each thread reminds you that your nerves are still attached to the living, breathing root systems beneath your feet.
Just remind yourself who you are, and what planet you’re from,
and soon the frost will melt,
the flowers will blossom,
I promise.
‘Sacred Grounds’
2026
Mixed textile pocket shrine
Four thousand years in the future, an archaeologist stands on what was once a rectangle of grass, now an overgrown wildness. Brambles catch under her feet.
The red bricks are crumbling now, the steel frames ancient and rusted.
But there is still something magical in this place, she can feel it: a weight of memories, shimmering in the air.
This is a place that holds so much. Four thousand years ago, this was a place of celebration, of music, chants and shouts. The roar of interconnected thousands of voices still echoes, calls to mind ancient stone circles and glittering cathedrals.
This place held stillness, too. Grief. A field of red roses for ninety-seven. A shirt with the number twenty. Weather-beaten stones carved in memory, ashes scattered. A quiet ‘I miss you’ whispered into the air and catching on an angel’s wing.
The archaeologist runs a flickering series of images through her mind like in the ancient VHS tapes she’s studied in the archives: A sky turning red with smoke-flares. The flutter of banners across the stands like giant silk butterflies. Colourful shirts, piercing whistles, hair ribbons, chants and shouts and music and magic and a million other things she can’t name, but she can feel.
The colours of the sky fade from gold to pink-purple to midnight, with constellations of stars glittering in the absence of floodlight. This place, she thinks, must be one of those sacred grounds.
‘PORTAL’
2026
Mixed textile pocket shrine
The un-manned spaceship destined for New Venus had been drifting in the void for a long time. Had it been months? Years? Decades? The spaceship pilot themself wasn’t sure. Out here, time crawled. A shapeless infinity stretched out in every direction from the window, as if the spaceship herself was wrapped tight in layers and layers of plastic bin bags. Several times it felt like the engines were about to burn out, her solar-batteries unable to photosynthesise. Not even a pinhole of starlight lit the way.
And it was in the strangest place, a sacred place, maybe, that the spaceship’s pilot finally spotted a rip in the fabric of the nothingness.
It glowed, at the back of a museum. A beautiful mausoleum, a sacred place dedicated to the echoes of living things. It was filled with the skeletons of animals from hundreds of years ago, with embryonic creatures in glass jars and embalming fluids instead of wombs.
But there it was, that unmistakable tear in the infinite dark, shimmering at the back of the shelves and cabinets under a neon sign that read ‘LIFE’.
The pilot pulled down the hood of their black aviator jacket painted with angel’s wings. They pushed their heart-shaped sunglasses on top of their head, so they could see more clearly in the half-light.
A wall of glass projector slides, hundreds of them, from the 1970s? 1980s? The pilot wasn’t sure. Each slide was arranged neatly into a grid that reached almost floor to ceiling, and each held an image of something so beautifully, perfectly alive: A barn owl, perching, watchful, on a stone wall. A deep-sea basket star, tentacles coiled like a long-ago painting of Medusa’s hair. A butterfly breaking from its chrysalis, wings still too fragile to fly.
And, most beautiful of all, a Venus fly trap, jaws held wide open as if to whisper, ‘welcome’.
The pilot smudged a few mascara-tears from their eyes. After so long in the dark, they were seeing everything in full colour. Everything glowed, sparkled. These fragments of glass were more beautiful than any painting in any art gallery in the world. No religious oil-on-canvas could ever hold a candle to Mother Nature’s creations: vivid and elegant and furious and delicate and so, so alive. Each feather, each petal, every spiral and fractal.
The pilot wondered if this was how a new-formed butterfly felt leaving a chrysalis, wings still delicate, untested. One steel-toed boot, then the other; into that glowing hole in the sky to the place where everything sparkled.
‘diamond-fragments/root-system rewired’
2026 (remix of ‘SHARDS’, 2021)
Plant, smashed mug, rhinestones, falcon’s eye crystal, coin.
Go and dig deep in the cardboard boxes of useless memories. The ones you’ve taped shut and torn at the corners, piled up in the cupboard behind the hoover and the little space heater, under the old Squier bass with the missing fret wires. Part the veils, the cobwebs, plastic bags, faded tea towels, cause there’s glittering fragments from another world inside: old treasures, old curses. Feel their edges, sharp on your palms, fresh as the day they shattered on the concrete in the yard out the back. They’re heavy with solvent and plastic, with the hum of Killing Joke’s Turn To Red and a phone set permanently on vibrate.
Now bury those sharp shards deep into the warm of the still-radioactive earth, with a crossroads-coin and a falcon’s-eye, and wait.
The roots hold them tight in a death-and-resurrection show. Nerves sizzle as they reconnect in new shapes, reanimated by the lightning-sparks, the pour of the spring rain.
The flies buzz.
By the moonrise before May Day, glittering green blades will cut themselves free from the once-scorched ground.
And the flowers will follow, in June.
‘VEIL (A Message For Everyone Inside The House)’
2026
Mixed textile curtain/banner, made from lace curtain, cotton sheet scraps, glass beads, ribbons, necklaces, dragon charm.
‘VEIL’ was shown from my living room window for the duration of the 2026 men’s football World Cup.
The men’s World Cup means there’ll be those flags hanging from windows again: white slashed with red, scrawled with caps-lock messages.
People will talk about ‘awareness’. They’ll tell a story about men coming home after a bad football result. As if it’s the team’s fault, or the beer’s fault, but never his. It’s a story that lets them ignore the nameless, faceless She who ‘loses every time’.
She, or They, or He.
But domestic abuse never did start and end with the 90 minute mark. The fear’s 24/7/365, exhausting, inescapable, flies crawling and buzzing into every nerve in your body til you stop noticing how cold it feels.
Hours and days blur, patterns forming on an endless replay loop. You just want to lift the lace curtain that clings like a net to the window frame, tear away the veil, and scream a scorching flame that splits the evening sky. But it’s too much. The lace is too heavy to lift alone.
So this is for everyone who’s been inside that house, behind that curtain. Maybe you got out, and you’re still finding the freedom dizzy. Maybe you grew up there. Maybe you only go back to that house in the shadowy corners of your dreams. Maybe you’re still inside, looking for a way out.
I don’t know all of your stories. But I do have a message for you, written in lace and ribbon and thousands of stitches.
To everyone who survived: May every star shine bright for you, the endless sparkling sky a roadmap to help you navigate the strange new seas of freedom.
And to everyone who didn’t: May every flower blossom for you, may you live forever in our memories, our stories, and in the roses that glow softly in the June morning sunlight. I hope you found peace, somewhere.
Awareness is not enough, because abuse is never accidental. Show solidarity with survivors: centre our voices, listen to our stories, believe us when we speak. Show love and patience if the words still turn to ice on our tongues. And remember the power of your small acts of kindness, because they’re the glow of a beacon above the stormy water, an ember-spark that warms even the most fear-frozen hands.
