Sarnia de la Maré FRSA Author, Musician, Artist

 Artists are often told not to look back — that retrospection is stagnation, that archives are mausoleums, that forward motion is the only respectable posture. But for feminist artists, the archive is not a graveyard. It is a universe. A constellation. A machine of time. History has rarely given women the dignity of continuity. Our stories appear in fragments, footnotes, scandals, sidebars, moral warnings. Our work is often lost, misattributed, unrecorded, or buried beneath male narratives of genius. To build an archive as a woman — particularly as a feminist, punk-influenced, countercultural artist — is not nostalgia. It is infrastructure. It is immortality engineering. An archive is a rebellion against erasure. My own archive spans decades: punk squats, Brighton counterculture, moving-image experiments, performance personas, erotic writings, glitch art, AI aesthetics, feminist essays, and the vast interconnected world of Immersion . To watch these fragments accumulate is ...

 Every era has its creation myth. The 21st century has two: the myth of the machine, and the myth of the self. For feminist artists, these myths collide in the most intimate way, because women have always been framed — by religion, by medicine, by art history — as the origin of bodies but not the authors of meaning. We were the biological machinery, never the myth-makers. Yet contemporary feminist art reveals something radical: women are not just creators of bodies; we are architects of worlds. We generate systems, symbols, archives, identities, digital creatures, performance environments, alter-egos, and entire aesthetic universes. We are no longer simply mothers of children; we are mothers of machines — machines in the broadest, most poetic sense. When I speak of “mothering machines,” I do not mean nurturing robots or raising android offspring (though Immersion certainly plays with that imagery). I mean the feminist labour of creating new forms of existence in art: digital...

 There is a particular archetype emerging in contemporary feminist art — a hybrid creature who moves between analogue and digital realms, dragging her history behind her like a comet tail of pink wires, broken code, erotic defiance and uncompromising critique. I call her the glitch-witch . She is not a technologist. She is not a programmer. She does not arrive with Silicon Valley swagger or the naïve libertarian optimism of early internet utopians. Instead, she appears like a system error in the machinery of digital order. She disrupts, distorts, corrupts and re-enchants the screen. The glitch-witch is not simply a feminist artist using technology. She is a feminist force haunting the technology that surveils her. In this sense, glitch feminism is not a style but a methodology — a way of rupturing the false stability of digital identity. Where the platform demands perfection, she inserts distortion. Where algorithms demand legibility, she offers misbehaviour. Where facial reco...

 The contemporary artist lives under uninterrupted surveillance. Not merely state surveillance (though that cobweb is always humming in the rafters), but the softer, more insidious surveillance of algorithmic witnessing — data trails, metrics, likes, biometrics, aesthetic categorisation. Our identities, once private negotiations, have been turned outward, flattened, and fed into machines that decide what kind of human we are allowed to be. For women, this is not new. We have always been watched. What is new is the ability to weaponise the gaze rather than flee it — a tactic feminist artists have honed for decades, sometimes consciously, sometimes instinctively. For me, the development of personas such as Pasha du Valentine or the Countess of Brighton and Hackney was not a theatrical flourish. It was a calculated feminist intervention: a deliberate exaggeration of gender, class and erotic codes that refused passive consumption. A persona is not a mask. A persona is a mirror ...

 We speak often about “preserving women’s voices,” but rarely do we address the uncomfortable truth: archives are inherently violent. They exclude, they sanitise, they organise memory into palatable sequences. Women, queer people, neurodivergent bodies, sex workers, punks, migrants — we are usually documented only in moments of scandal, danger, or failure. This is why self-archiving became a feminist act. Brighton Arts Club, Goddamn Media, the digital diaries, the moving-image loops, the obsessive documentation of performance personas — these were never indulgences. They were counteractions. Survival tactics. Ways of refusing erasure. Mainstream archives prefer a certain legibility: dates, exhibitions, institutions, grant-funded projects. But counterculture thrives in the unrecorded, the ephemeral, the badly lit, the chaotic. Feminist art history is full of ghosts. Brilliant ghosts. Unseen performances. Lost zines. Deleted photographs. Women whose entire careers exist only in me...

 There is a particular electricity that crackles at the place where transgression meets reclamation. For many women artists, myself included, this is the exact point from which real creative agency begins — not the polite, domesticated kind of agency that fits comfortably into grant proposals, but a feral, sharpened-to-the-bone instinct. A refusal to be sculpted by the gaze, the market, the academy, or the politely curated feminism of institutional spaces. The feral feminine is not a marketing category. It is a survival instinct. A returning-to-the-body. A clawing back of selfhood. In the 1980s London punk co-operatives, feminine agency was not handed out in tidy envelopes. You had to forge it. Sometimes violently. Sometimes through laughter, paint, noise, or smashed aesthetics. The punk movement did not offer safety — but it did offer a new aesthetic language: distortion, rupture, interruption. These became our tools long before “intersectional feminism” appeared on universit...