Sarnia de la Maré FRSA Author, Musician, Artist

 Beauty, for women, has never been neutral. It is a currency, a weapon, a cage, a performance, a threat, a promise, a provocation, a negotiation, and occasionally — if we’re lucky — a pleasure. But in the history of art, beauty is most often a leash. The feminine body appears in Western art as an object of interpretation rather than a force of creation: gazed upon, worshipped, dissected, idealised, punished. Beauty became a disciplinary mechanism; even now, women are expected to participate in their own aesthetic containment. But what happens when the artist refuses to behave? This question has been at the core of my work for decades. In my early punk years, beauty was something to be rejected outright — a trap, a patriarchal choreography designed to minimise autonomy. I shaved things, ripped things, painted things that were not meant to be painted. My femininity was not something to be displayed; it was something to deconstruct. Later came a more interesting realisation: beaut...

 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...