HEEL

Artist statement

HEEL emerged through layers of paint, built up, scratched back, and reworked. This process mirrored my resistance to what the image was asking me to face. From my MA Independent Scholarship exploring masking, trauma, and self-identity, the work centres on a Bishop figure: an internalised authority standing over smaller, fragmented forms shaped by compliance and suppressed emotion.

Painting a bold white cross over the Bishop became a turning point. Not erasing it, but disrupting its power. Words followed, urgent and unplanned: HEEL, RUN, REBEL, FIGHT. These weren’t considered additions; they arrived as acts of reclamation, pushing back against inherited messages of silence and submission.

The painting holds the tension between oppression and resistance. What once felt overwhelming became something witnessed, named, and held, showing how symbolic image-making can begin to shift what has long been masked.

Martin is an HCPC-registered art psychotherapist working with children and young people across Derbyshire and Staffordshire. He is also a professional contemporary artist with over twenty years of experience, whose abstract and conceptual work explores themes of identity, masking and emotional resilience.

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Martin’s art was submitted and selected for our online galleries. We are always looking for new artworks to share, and we often run themed calls for artwork.

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