Nine Years makes a powerful addition to any space where reflection, resilience and personal truth are honoured. Its abstract form and muted palette allow it to sit effortlessly within spaces that invite you to pause when you pass it.
Displaying this piece in your home serves as a reminder of the unseen labour so many women carry. It portrays the strength required to advocate for your body and the importance of taking your experiences seriously. It brings depth and intuition into a space, signalling that your environment is one that values awareness, compassion and emotional honesty.
Nine Years
The Story Behind the Artwork
This piece began from the quiet frustration of living in a body that doesn’t always make sense to you. It reflects the wider landscape of women’s healthcare, where hormonal fluctuations and reproductive conditions remain understudied and often dismissed. Despite affecting around one in ten women, endometriosis is still severely under-researched, with an average diagnostic delay of nine years. These gaps reveal how limited medical knowledge of women’s bodies has been throughout modern history.
Symptoms frequently dismissed as hormonal rather than recognised as legitimate physiological experiences. As a result, women are often left to self-diagnose, seek clarity alone, and privately interpret symptoms without adequate clinical support. This painting speaks directly to that systemic gap: the disconnect between real, embodied distress and the lack of scientific frameworks capable of naming or validating it.
Visual elements
The figure is curled inward, a familiar posture of discomfort and withdrawal. She carries the same colours as the background, creating a subtle sense of chaos and overlap. This blending reflects the silent exhaustion of managing discomfort and the endurance of our bodies without acknowledgment. It mirrors how women's symptoms are often overlooked, misunderstood or attributed to something else entirely.
Abstract strokes of blues, greens and soft neutrals form her shape, creating a feeling of self containment. With no sharply defined outlines, her body dissolves into the background. this intentional lack of clarity reflects the uncertainty surrounding women's health when pain is minimised or dismissed.
The softened edges echo the blurred boundaries of women's lived experiences, where pain becomes indistinguishable from the environment around it, and the difficultly of naming symptoms that are real but not always clinically recognised.
Meaning and intent
This piece explores the emotional reality of living in a body that feels unpredictable and often misunderstood. It speaks to the emotional fatigue of navigating work, relationships and creativity while coping with something that isn't outwardly visible.
By dissolving into the background, the figure becomes a metaphor for how easily women's pain slips out of focus when the world lacks the language to validate it.
Ultimately, this piece honours the resilience required to live with symptoms that are unseen, and the ongoing effort of trying to make sense of a body that doesn't always align with the life you are trying to live.
Display recommendations
Nine Years makes a powerful addition to any space where reflection, resilience and personal truth are honoured. Its abstract form and muted palette allow it to sit effortlessly within spaces that invite you to pause when you pass it.
Displaying this piece in your home serves as a reminder of the unseen labour so many women carry. It portrays the strength required to advocate for your body and the importance of taking your experiences seriously. It brings depth and intuition into a space, signalling that your environment is one that values awareness, compassion and emotional honesty.