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22nd November 2021
Age 15, after a year of having no home, and searching desperately, with all the adverts saying NO DSS, or unwilling to accept people without a reference/ASBO, my family found a slumlord who would take us on. I don’t call him that as a cus, he was serving a social function that no one else would, housing the other. We got a 2 up 2 down house in Awsworth for four kids and my mum. My dad couldn’t live there because he was on tag, he was also getting out of control with drugs and becoming unreliable. He had to hide his addiction because if they found out he would have to go back inside. I slept under the stairs. The garden was full of needles and the door kicked open. I never had a key. The supermarket was too far for us to get to without a car, so we lived off corner shop food. The street was all of the same kind of people, poor single parents on the last chance, in a village surrounded by middle class people with nice pets, children and cars. The last bus was at 6pm and so I spent many nights walking miles and miles to friends or a nearer bus stop. I got lost a fair few times in the fields because I had no maps, no phone, no internet and no idea about where things were in relation to each other. This was when my mental health was
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Categories: Artist, Collaborative Residencies, Dudley
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DDERFs (Drug Dealer Exclusionary Radical Feminist)

22nd November 2021
When I lived in Bristol I ended up randomly at a talk about legalization of drugs. My MP was on the panel. She had already been shooed out of my garden once, but that's another story. Now here she was again. During the talk she mentioned she wanted to decriminalise drugs but had an issue with dealers. You’ve many heard of TERFSs and possibly SWERFs. Here are the DDERFs. Why split hairs? It's all carceral feminism. “I just don’t like them,” she said. I was a fist of emotions. I managed to wait to the end when my ego wanted to take her down publicly. No, no. I’m on a spiritual program now. Humiliating one MP isn’t gonna out the past right. I waited till the end.  “I just wanted to let you know how I feel about what you said up there. You know there is as much variation in dealers ethically as landlords of pubs. You get good ones who care about their customers and ones who exploit people.”  “I know it’s an unpopular opinion.” She said, standing by herself. “Well your unpopular opinion is why my Dad went to prison. And why I was called scum at school. He was serving a social function. And I was dependent on him. We were all punished, it ruined many people's lives.” She wasn’t getting it.  Another person from the panel who ran a group called anyone’s child, about people whose kids had
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Categories: Artist, Collaborative Residencies, Dudley
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DIAMONDS

22nd November 2021
Two weeks ago, my Dad relapsed and died. I've been sulking and I haven’t wanted to talk about it. I can't be fucked to explain and dislike the pity in peoples eyes when I try. My life seems to be in a different reality to most people, a war. On the other hand, I want to be open because others being candid about these things helped me so much.  So this is for the child carers and child criminals who grew up in poverty. Those ones that made it out but haven’t found an island yet. This is also for the ones that didn't make it, like my dad who lives with the addict and alcoholic ancestors. And the ones who died in custody or homeless. I lost three dads now to addiction in various ways. My grandad, my step dad, my biological dad. I feel ok about it. I've let it break my heart. I know things not many people know. I used to see myself as always on the back foot. But it doesn’t make sense to put myself at the center of this. It’s just happening all around me. I've learned transmutation. That’s my gift. For everything I went though. I know how to turn shit into gold. I’m a diamond. What does it feel like to be this strong? I’ll tell you. It’s like watching everything else around you crumble to dust.  The people I loved. The places I lived.
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Categories: Artist, Collaborative Residencies, Dudley
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RAVE TUNES

20th November 2021

Today I am listening back to old rave tunes and thinking about what’s been lost since the day of the first free festivals.

Within pride there has become an effort to resist assimilation which has been brought along with the naming of Marsha P as the starter of the gay rights movement Within the drugs, class and land world this has not happened.

Festivals have gates and fences and police. Someone always has to have their life ruined for selling everyone drugs on site. Before this, I’m told, gangs made festivals a hostile environment. Everyone knows everyone is on drugs but will stand by while someone is hung out to dry to create the safety they could get from legalisation. This is the white method of safety. It’s arbitrary and random, like a shit game of musical chairs. We could have just decriminalized drugs?

I came from where your drug came from. I lived in your dealer's house. As a child I saw your drugs cut and weighed. The police came and fucked up my home. And then a judge took it away. You weren't there then. And when my life fell apart you disappeared. No one defended my dad.

When I hear Sweet Harmony I don’t think of a euphoric moment of everyone coming together, I feel like I'm gonna explode because there's a child with complex adult feelings of loss that it can't understand. The loss absorbed all that energy, hope and magic and it became an insincere

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Categories: Artist, Collaborative Residencies, Dudley
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God is an Abolitionist

20th November 2021

So you're all abolitionists now which is nice! Maybe I can get more publicly wacky in other ways. Ready for the G word?

I loveeee the new Netflix show Midnight Gospel. But I have some criticisms about the use of prison within the narratives. Why does Bob (the prisoner) have to realise his violence keeps him from enlightenment? What an ungenerous reading of violence. Why use prisoners to tell a story about spirituality and the human condition? It's such a cliche. Why is it never on the guard to realise he’s pissing in his own eye? Why do people with jobs never have to realise how trapped they are? Why is the violence of the walls invisible?

The Buddha said we can get self realisation from any realm, human, hell or other. There is always a path. So why the fetish for hell? Do they know any violent prisoners? Why are we threatened by violence when it's criminal and not, say, army violence? Why are people so obsessed with these kinds of people's realization? Stop pretending to do Bob a favour. Or people who die in custody. It is at best a lazy representation, spiritual bypassing and at worst justification for oppressive control over people whose lives you know nothing about.

On the subject of spiritual bypassing I found this book the same week by a benign cult, the Hare Krishnas, talking to the biggest gang in the world, the lieutenant of Chicago Police public media relations department. They were

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Categories: Artist, Collaborative Residencies, Dudley
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NO FUTURE, LIBERATION NOW!

20th November 2021

Carceral Feminism will ruin your nervous system. And if all you have to offer me is time, you're not offering me anything.

The now is threatening to the mind.

I can hear Enya singing Only Time behind me. It’s making me stressed. Time has been used against me over and over.

My trans initiation has been delayed to the future. My doctor told me it was good that I had time to think about it. I told her that without any support it was neglect. And the future doesn’t actually exist.

The nervous system is a time machine. My energy is leaking into different dimensions. It splinters my reality. And things happen in that time.

When my dad was given time. We lost our home. I went through puberty. He became an addict.

I've been waiting for two years for the GIC, I've become homeless again and my dad has died. I face a second puberty on my own.

Sentencing my gender to more nervous system deregulation. Riding austerity and fascism. She sounds so fucking ambivlient.

Who can say where the road goes? Who knows? Only time.
And I wanna scream, “No Enya, I mean... doctor, it doesn’t have to be this way!”

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Categories: Artist, Collaborative Residencies, Dudley
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Holiday Camp

13th November 2021

I've wondered a lot why class is the hill I am willing to die on. I feel so glad when I think about prisons and private schools closing. I found out recently that the prison I visited my Dad in was declared by a judge in court as like a holiday camp.

I get pissed off with people saying “They have TV you know.” Firstly, how oblivious. What holiday camps do you know where people and sometimes babies die of neglect?

As a kid my dad would write to me from prison, telling me the food was better than at home and how nice this or that was. I guess he didn’t want me to worry.

Obviously holiday performativity is one way of blagging your way though so you can't be hurt by reality. I used to do this sort of thing at shit jobs i've worked.

But when people who know nothing about prison say this it doesn’t mean the same thing at all. People are complaining a lot about the lockdown and I’m thinking? You got an xbox?

Performativity is a great way to muster dignity for the tough bits of life. My gender gives me a little something nice I can't explain that makes life feel doable. And I’m leaning on being on holiday hard to get though today. I've got the heating on too high, I've got bad sunglasses on and I’m listening to Holiday by Madonna.

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Categories: Artist, Collaborative Residencies, Dudley, Uncategorised
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Doors to reduce anxiety

16th October 2021
4. Doors to reduce anxiety. I’m in the dark, it’s not entirely dark because the morning light is seeping in through the top of the curtains and onto the ceiling. The bedroom door is shut. Shutting the world out, keeping me safe inside. I’m lucky to have had all the bedroom doors in my life, some more temporary than others. When everything is good and I’m feeling like things are going my way, I might not notice the door being open. When things are going well, when the door is open, I’m more open. But right now that scares me, I feel safe here, with the door closed. My heart is racing because the day ahead is busier than my body and mind needs it to be. You need to live, you need to earn. Rest is a privilege. Rest is for when you’re too sick to work. I have a friend from my school days. He still lives in the same house, the same room we smoked in as teens and listened to Janes Addiction, Nirvana and Alice in Chains. His life is filled with panic since he became ill, he rarely leaves his room, unless it’s to go to the local shop for booze and fags. I’d return from traveling and tell him stories about the world. He’d sit wide-eyed, hunched over and clutching onto his Fosters “How can you do all of this? Aren’t you frightened you’re going to die?” he
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Categories: Artist, Collaborative Residencies, Lisa Selby
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Council flat doors

16th October 2021
 
3. Council flat doors. As a child I never took time to try to understand what a council flat was, compared to any other flat or house. I just knew that my school friends homes didn’t look like mine. But dad kept it nice, it was small and safe. All of us would play out freely on our bikes. None of us were very popular at school, but we were all the same when we were on the estate. I lived next door to another Lisa, so when friends from the estate knocked on our doors to come out to play, they’d ask for me, ‘Big Lisa’. I’ve always been tall, and I was the oldest one too. The doors. First you had to get through the main door, the one everyone in the block shared. Then the metal lift doors, also everyones doors, although we didn’t own them. Then our own front doors, we didn’t own these either, these were all the same. Everyone knew everyone. Some days I’d take the lift up to the top floor, it overlooked two graveyards. I could breathe up there. Most kids were scared of the graveyards, but I found them peaceful. I’d go there in my early teens and put blossom on as many graves as I could. It was the ‘better’ estate in the area, the other one across the road was full of drugs and violence, life was harder for the people I knew there.
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Categories: Artist, Collaborative Residencies, Lisa Selby
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