Hireth—a Cornish word for longing for home, or being homesick for a place you have never been—describes for me the feeling of being untethered to the notion of home. This isn’t about grief. It’s about belonging. It’s also the sense of finding my place, a spectre of place I’ve always carried within me, even when I didn’t recognise it.

My new work Once More With Feeling, Marks a journey back to my studio practice after years of working in industry to make ends meet, and after reconnecting to the roots of my heritage—roots that shaped me long before I even knew they existed. I discovered my lineage has always been bound in strength and fortitude. Generations of people who, just like I do, faced struggle to survive as a creative, the barriers and an unseen threat in the life of an artist,  and, despite it being generations later, this narrative pervades.

Among the litany of my working-class ancestors, I discovered I’m related to a Luddite leader tried for murder, whose defiance against systemic oppression still echoes today. We don’t inherit memory, but we inherit the will to survive, to fight for something better. I’m proud of the women and men I come from, their quiet strength, and the subtle defiance that runs through everything like a seam of true grit. Their legacy lives on—it’s still relevant, in a world that they helped to build, but a world that was never built to remember them or even know their names.

My story is not unique—Once More With Feeling touches on a shared legacy, a heritage that is familiar in some way. It’s about the unspoken stories, the heirlooms passed down—not for their value, but for their significance to the people who owned them. The things we carry with us, whether we realise it or not—objects, stories, rituals—are testaments to the strength and fortitude of everyday people who came before us. My history, though uniquely mine, is also the story of many. It’s a lineage that’s not rare but common.

I feel privileged to be the caretaker of this history that is uniquely mine, yet shared in the familiar. This work reanimates the overlooked, the everyday, or the custom and turns them into new relics with presence. These relics are symbols of quiet survival, a beauty, and strength in the face of adversity. It is a quiet call to arms, about remembering and belonging—reclaiming what was always ours, even when we were robbed of it all in the name of profit.

I want this work to sing us back home. Once more with feeling.