Creation is a deep-purple fabric unfurled like a banner of quiet rebellion—repeating motifs of the uterus, rendered in tender, defiant lines, blooming across the surface like wounds that refuse silence. Exhibited at Dareshack in Bristol, this textile is both intimate confession and public embrace: a love letter to every woman who, like me, lives with endometriosis and the relentless, unseen pain it carves into our bodies. Invisible illness thrives in dismissal—“it’s just period pain,” they say—but this fabric insists otherwise. It makes the internal external, the private shared, wrapping the viewer in the same soft, persistent ache that has shaped my days, my art, my survival.

As Abby Norman writes in Ask Me About My Uterus: “I’ve often found it curious that when a woman is suffering, her competence is questioned, but when a man is suffering, he’s humanized. It’s a gender stereotype that hurts both men and women, though it lends itself to the question of why there is a proclivity in health care, and in society, to deny female pain.” This piece confronts that denial head-on. It is for us—the ones who smile through flares, who push through exhaustion, who are told our agony is exaggeration.

And as one voice from the endometriosis community echoes: “Just because someone carries it well doesn’t mean it isn’t heavy.” Here, on this fabric, the weight is finally laid bare, held, witnessed. Wear it, touch it, let it remind you: our pain is real, our bodies are sovereign, and in naming the invisible, we begin to heal—not alone, but together.

For every woman who has felt broken inside her own skin, this is solidarity stitched in purple. You are seen. You are not alone. 💜