I'm fine. Vanessa Fairfax-Woods

This exhibition brings together two projects that are both rooted in lived experience. At their core, they ask what it means to be a person, particularly a woman, trying to hold themselves together in spaces that are meant to offer safety, but often come with unspoken rules.

and so, I act cold begins in the home. Often described as a place of comfort, the home is also where expectations around femininity are quietly reinforced. Women learn how to behave there: how to care, how to look, how much of themselves is acceptable to show. Certain traits are encouraged: softness, desirability, calm; while others are toned down or hidden. The work reflects on this constant self-editing and asks whether it’s ever possible to fully relax into who you are, even behind closed doors, or whether these roles follow us everywhere.

PullMySelfToGetHer turns inward and traces a long relationship with mental illness. Using personal archives, damaged photographs and performance, the work moves through moments of breakdown and attempted repair. Recovery is shown not as a clear path forward, but as something repetitive and uncertain. Simple tasks used during therapies: puzzles, sorting, rebuilding; mirror the effort of trying to piece a sense of self back together when it has come apart.

Seen together, these works speak about pressure, survival and vulnerability. They acknowledge fragmentation not as failure, but as a reality of living. Rather than offering tidy answers, the exhibition sits with uncertainty and asks how we keep going when wholeness feels out of reach.