'Bridging The Gap' Exhibition 2025

Bridging The Gap was a collaborative exhibition presented alongside two other artists, each working independently to examine different aspects of masculinity, power, and social responsibility. My contribution focused on the language used by policing and media institutions to describe violence against women, and the persistence of misogynistic attitudes despite repeated claims that lessons have been learned. At the centre of my contribution was Banter, a body of work responding to the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Metropolitan Police officer and to the findings of the Angiolini Inquiry, which exposed profound failures in vetting, reporting, and accountability. The work examines how misogynistic language circulates within institutional cultures, often dismissed as humour or minimised as banter, and how this language creates conditions in which violence is excused, tolerated, or ignored.

Two contrasting text works formed the core of this installation. The phrase A Black Eye Usually Sorts Her Out was presented in small black ceramic letters, echoing the scale and familiarity of magnetic fridge lettering. This domestic scale invited close looking, physical proximity and touch, drawing attention to how such language enters everyday life casually and without immediate consequence.
In contrast, the word BANTER appeared in large scale black ceramic letters mounted directly onto the wall. Enlarged and fixed in place, the term shifted from something dismissive to something unavoidable. Rather than explaining or softening the language, the work exposed how the word banter is used to shield misogyny from scrutiny while granting it cultural permission.
These works were anchored by a lectern referencing public address, authority, and official speech. Placed upon it was a printed play script written by the artist, composed entirely from misogynistic language taken from the Metropolitan Police WhatsApp group linked to the Sarah Everard case. The script was structured as a spoken work, with the narrator voiced by the Angiolini Inquiry itself. By positioning an official investigation as narrator, the work highlighted the tension between institutional self scrutiny and the cultures it seeks to regulate.

The lectern positioned the language as something delivered, sanctioned, and heard. Viewers were invited to consider how misogynistic speech circulates within systems of authority, and how it persists even as institutions publicly claim reform. Alongside Banter, I presented a series of works responding to the Yorkshire Ripper murders, drawing on archival imagery and direct quotations from police and media reporting. These works focused not on the perpetrator, but on the language used to categorise victims, repeatedly distinguishing between women described as prostitutes and those framed as respectable, innocent, or from good homes. By isolating and holding this language in place, the work exposed how moral hierarchies were embedded within official discourse, shaping public empathy, investigative urgency, and historical memory.

Placing these bodies of work together was intentional. Despite the passage of more than forty years between the Yorkshire Ripper investigation and the murder of Sarah Everard, the exhibition revealed a striking continuity in how misogynistic language operates within policing and media institutions. While official statements continue to assert that lessons have been learned, the work questioned what meaningful change looks like when language, one of the primary carriers of culture, remains largely unexamined.

Bridging The Gap marked a significant moment in my practice, consolidating my commitment to working with real world language as material evidence. By fixing these words in ceramic form, altering their scale, and placing them within structures of authority, the work asks not only what was said, but what that language made possible, and why its repetition continues to be tolerated