Remember all that time ago – it seems like a thousand years – when we first went into lockdown and so many of us promised ourselves myriad ways to stay entertained, distracted, productive and creative? In reality, our most important task was to avoid contracting or spreading a deadly virus, but the shadow of our hyper-capitalist society backed us into a corner, deafeningly whispering “to be worthy, you must create. You must produce”. The desire to resist this notion and the need for creative expression have formed an interesting conflict in me. Or at least, it seemed to be a conflict. But coming to terms with permission to ‘just be’ and a need to turn thoughts, feelings, pain and things that can’t be expressed any other way into some kind of artform are not mutually exclusive.