TRANSMISSION ©️

Transmission ( Original 2015)

This piece started as a photograph taken years ago, in a lounge with a plain back wall. No studio, no crew, no plan beyond a vision I couldn't put down until I'd made it real.

The wire was a real sculpture — hand-formed and painted, originally made for another artist's shoot that went on to be published in a hair magazine. I'd used masking tape to cut the sharp line in the eye makeup, and more tape sectioned into my own bleached-blonde hair to place that violet-to-rose colour in the fringe. Everything you see in the base image happened, physically, in a room, with tape and paint and whatever was on hand.

I was never meant to be the model. I hated it. But when an idea arrived — floral hair, polka dot hair, textile hair, this one — there usually wasn't a model standing by to hand it to. So by default, it had to be me.

I think that got misread. Years of images of me wearing the ideas I couldn't stop having probably looked, to anyone watching from outside, like vanity — like I loved being in front of the camera. I didn't. There was no choice in it. An idea would arrive fully formed and simply had to be brought into the world, and I was the only body available at the time to carry it.

What's changed is that I now have the tools to finish the vision the way it looked in my head in the first place, without needing to be the model to do it. Where I once relied on phone filters and saturation tweaks to get partway there, I can now build the whole picture — a different face, a different setting, a fully imagined world — using editing software. That's the honest difference between then and now: not a different idea, just a longer reach.

The wires, I've come to think, look like an aerial. A receptor. And I don't think that's an accident, because I don't believe creativity is something we generate so much as something we're briefly tuned to receive. I don't have a tidy theory of where these ideas come from — I've never once set out with a strategy. The idea arrives, it insists, I make it, and only afterward does the meaning show up. This image sat untouched since around 2015 until I found it again this year and understood, finally, what to call it. Transmission — because whatever this is, it seems to come through rather than from.

There's a psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist, who lives on the Isle of Skye and has spent decades arguing that the old left-brain/right-brain split isn't nonsense so much as it's been oversimplified — that the two hemispheres genuinely process the world differently, even though the neat "logical left, creative right" story most of us grew up with doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It's a live, contested debate in neuroscience. I don't know where the ideas come from. I'm not sure anyone does. I just know I'm not fully in control of them arriving, only of what happens once they do.

I've never been diagnosed with autism. Nobody has ever sat with me for long enough to find out. But people who knew me at Daisy's used to ask, unprompted, whether I was on the spectrum — long before I had language for any of it. I've since read about monotropism: a way of paying attention where one interest takes up nearly all the available space, and where being pulled out of it feels less like an inconvenience and more like an assault. That's the closest description I've found for what this has always been. Not a hobby. Not a phase. A fixed, singular pull toward hair as a creative medium that has never once let go of me, whatever else has happened in my life.

And plenty else has happened. I have complex PTSD, and I'm physically limited now in ways I wasn't then, so bringing a vision into the world takes far longer than it used to. But the compulsion hasn't moved an inch. If anything, I understand now why it's never let up: making something absorbs me so completely that, for as long as I'm in it, the trauma doesn't get airtime. There's real research behind that — flow states measurably quiet the parts of the brain that generate fear and self-monitoring, and structured creative or flow-based practice has been shown to meaningfully reduce PTSD symptoms in people who've been through the worst of it. So when I say this calms me, I don't mean it loosely. It's doing something.

I'm inflexible about it. I'd struggle to hide how I felt if someone tried to tell me to stop. I don't fully understand why it has to be this way — only that it does, and always has, and that trying to talk me out of it has never once worked.

A note on process: the base photograph is real — the wire sculpture, the sectioned and coloured hair, the eye makeup — all made and shot years ago. The final image has been developed further using editing software to complete the vision as it was originally imagined.