So to be blunt, my father was extremely abusive and growing up with that kind of presence (with no exit) meant that escapism was a fundamentally important part of my life as a child. Art and drawing and cartoons became another world I could dissolve myself into in order to survive the situation. When I was old enough to draw things for myself, I realised I could use art to create whatever I wanted. I could use it as a vehicle to express difficult emotions and happily lose myself in the process.

Most of my conceptual practice starts from my (or the people I love) real-life experiences. I really try to avoid imagining scenarios that I haven't lived through myself or haven’t spoken directly to someone it’s happened to. I guess I hope that by doing this, other people can feel seen and validated in their experiences of potentially the same thing and we can see issues on a larger scale. I hope this then stimulates important conversations and eventually action and change.

Sexual abuse and domestic violence are things that the more we talk about, the more prevalent we realise they are. I think that there needs to be better education around what domestic violence and sexual abuse actually look like. For example, the fact that most victims know their perpetrators very closely and that abuse of any kind starts so subtly that first signs can go unnoticed. I wish we, as a society, and especially men to other men, would talk about these issues more.

Well, for me, it’s simply a fact – I live with mental illness. For me, publicly displaying that is kind of a defence mechanism. I guess I’m hoping it weeds out anyone who might have a problem with it. I think anytime anyone with a ‘disadvantage’ or ‘difference’ lives openly, it’s almost always read as activism because people are expecting us to hide that part of ourselves. It’s just a part of my life and I am in a position of privilege that allows me to safely declare it as part of my identity.

Pink is a colour that, yes, has traditionally been used to mark something as ‘feminine’ – and, most of the time, that mark brings a whole set of rules and prejudices along with it. I also think that because most of the time pink is shoved in women’s faces since childhood, there’s a nostalgia that colour can carry and ultimately says ‘this is for you’. So for all those reasons and more, I use it as the foundation for my work.

I illustrate my characters with body hair to simply offer a visual alternative to the way mainstream media presents feminine bodies. Most of us naturally grow body hair, we were just told from a young age that you should never see it.

I am constantly inspired by the work these women put into the world. Not only does their practice inform mine but their work makes me feel seen as I make my way through the world as a woman myself.

All my work is digital because that’s the supplies I had access to when I was a student. Also, digital format allows me to share my work quickly and effectively with a worldwide audience, which I love. However, as I move forward, I do continue to incorporate more traditional art techniques into projects and hope to continue into the future.

The irony is that other people labelled me a bitch before I took that label and ran with it. As I talk about in the book, the word ‘bitch’ has followed me and the women around me my whole life, and it is such an all-encompassing label that it’s pretty inescapable if you want to exist in a world that hates bold women. So, after much thought, I decided to draw what I thought a bitch really was and reclaim the word for myself and anyone who resonated with it.