Work in progress

Silence is not an absence. It is something built over generations through inherited systems, religious tradition, and social conditioning so deeply embedded that it stops feeling like a choice. A Cry Still Unheard examines how patriarchal structures encode themselves into the sacred and the domestic, and what it costs when they go unchallenged. The pattern this work traces is not bound to one place or one culture. It surfaces across geographies and centuries in recognisably similar forms. I am approaching it from the inside, as someone who grew up witnessing these structures, not as an observer translating from a distance.

The work uses cyanotype deliberately. Blue carries a long history as a mark of authority and control, and the cyanotype process renders everything in that single blue without exception. To use it here is an act of reclamation: taking the colour of institutional power and making it hold what that power has chosen not to count. I was drawn to cyanotype for its closeness to photography itself, and for the way each print keeps changing long after it is made. Exposed to light and weather, it fades and shifts, never quite settling, in the same way memory does. Hand embroidery in red thread disrupts that blue field. Each stitch is irreversible and individually made, resistant to being read as a statistic. Blue and red are not a palette choice here but a structure: control and reckoning, held in the same frame.

The work unfolds in three parts, moving from the statistical to the personal to the collective.

A project dossier is available on request for curators and institutions.