But It Was Just a Milkshake

Hand embroidery
100 x 100cm

This piece has been in my studio for years, waiting to be stitched. I even managed to make a start, but commissions took me away from it time and again.

It was conceived and sketched in 2019 right before I published my essay ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow, Something Went Terribly Wrong’. 

While researching, writing and stitching the accompanying embroidery to the essay, a worrying trend of publicly throwing milkshakes at people who were deemed as “fascist” (particularly, perhaps exclusively, by the far left) took hold. In the UK, it was people like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, while in the States, it was readily employed by the thugs of Antifa against, amongst others, the conservative journalist Andy Ngo during a ‘protest rally’. 

Now, you can think of Farage, Robbinson and whoever else got milkshaked however you wish, I am not here to police your political views, but it was very obvious to me, that this was a slippery slope that no civil society should venture down. 

I was about to publish my life-changing essay and was well aware that there will be extreme ideologues who will do their very best to portray me too as evil incarnate once the piece was published, thus justifying any means of opposing me. In other words, I too would put myself into the firing line of the self-righteous. This was an anxiety inducing thought, which, fortunately, did not stop me from publishing anyway. Though it did provide the inspiration for this piece. 

Surrounded by large flowers, which in part obscure and in part reveal, and even scream in desperation, is the Labyrinth of the NeverEnding Story; a maze of differing, conflicting storylines and perspectives unfolding in parallel.

A flagellating ‘man-bun’ (the type well versed in feminist discourse, ready to educate uppity women how feminism and “being a woman” is really done); a narcissistic NB (non-binary) guy posing for a selfie with his new shirt demanding “MOVE, I’M THEY”; a Stonewall propaganda plane with a banner of the “NO DEBATE” mantra; an Antifa thug, clad in black with the now obligatory trans-allegiance flag on his shirt, ‘bravely’ attacks the supposed ‘enemy’; a MAGA conservative traditionalist, visualising the ever deepening gulf between our individual, subjective realities (not just in America but across the globe). 

Nobody knows truly what the ‘right’ side of history is but everybody is convinced that it is theirs.

At one dead-end of the Labyrinth is “Woman Of The Year” Bruce Jenner, juxtaposed with a brave Iranian woman nestled atop of it all, between the flowers and bees. She has removed her headscarf in a #whitewednesday protest, a movement against backwards hijab ‘morality laws’ imposed on actual woman in Iran. This is a severely punishable offence, making it an incredibly courageous act. Just try and identify out of that oppression; see what happens. The luxury Western belief that humans can change sex, which of course they can’t, is revealed as the decadent, ignorant, privileged fantasy it is.

And then there is the milkshake flying across the scene. 

All of it is an attempt to thread together and find meaning in all these simultaneous happenings. Meaning for women across the globe, as well as humanity in general.

‘It Was Just a Milkshake’ is a comment on the disintegration of the social fabric we are witnessing across the world today.

It’s never just a milkshake.

£50,000
£40,000

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