I took this portrait of my daughter during lockdown a few weeks before her 17th birthday. I feel for young people in education facing yet more uncertainty during lockdown.

“When people come to visit, then leave I feel very sad, those people are going back to loved ones. I’m on my own. This set of portraits is an insight into my mother’s life and aims to highlight the loneliness a lot of older people experience. I live in the UK and she lives in Australia, this recent visit was the first time I had seen her in over four years. At 86 she visits the local school and listens to the children read. Each year she knits every child in the class an Australian Native animal. I feel sad, seeing so little of her. I worry about her ability to look after herself as she gets older. I hope this series of portraits shows both her vulnerability and her resilience.

“When people come to visit, then leave I feel very sad, those people are going back to loved ones. I’m on my own. This set of portraits is an insight into my mother’s life and aims to highlight the loneliness a lot of older people experience. I live in the UK and she lives in Australia, this recent visit was the first time I had seen her in over four years. She walks every day to feed a retired race-horse Bugsy. He runs across the field when he sees here coming. I feel sad, seeing so little of her. I worry about her ability to look after herself as she gets older. I hope this series of portraits shows both her vulnerability and her resilience.

This portrait is part of an ongoing project about the culture I grew up in in a small town on the North East Coast of Australia. Cathy - “At 13, I thought my only option was to marry the teacher who had groomed and raped and silenced me. He controlled our ‘special secret love’ and sexually abused me for five years. At 53, I braved up and told my story. If a predator is being watched, they don’t strike. I painted shark eyes on my surfboard." Cathy now wants to take on and expose the culture that facilitated child abuse. There are still those who blame her for being a child victim and others who refuse to confront their own complicity.

I was commissioned by the Forge, Arts Organisation to make a series of portraits, for a participatory community project called Everyday Lives in Stanley Durham. The work was inspired by the pitman poet Tommy Armstrong who celebrated the mining communities of the past and aims to capture the courage resilience compassion and humour that live on in Stanley, today. Coral who is 8 years old spends a great deal of her spare time raising money for various charities.

I took Ayan's picture for a Commission for the Women's Inclusive Team, Tower Hamlets. Ayan was selected as one of the women who had gone above and beyond for her community during the 2020 lockdowns.