From Pots to Protest: My Personal Battle Against Censorship

Photo credit: Sylvain Deleu - "I'm Not the Criminal" (2019) - one of the pots that was impacted by numerous cancellations.

Why I Chose Clay

I never sought to be a political activist. I am a potter. My vocation is to tell stories, particularly those of women who have endured trauma, war, displacement, and exploitation. Ceramics has always struck me as the perfect medium for this. Pots are great at both recording stories and telling them. Go to any museum in Europe and you’ll find pottery silently chronicling forgotten lives and uprisings. In 17th- and 18th-century Britain, pots bore witness to family celebrations, protests, and revolutions. In the American South, pots made by enslaved people sometimes offered the only surviving accounts of resistance, scratched out under the threat of death.

What drew me from painting to clay was the pot’s revolving form, a canvas that turns. It allows for an unfolding narrative, without beginning or end. The concave and convex surfaces — what we call ‘potter’s space’ — are like trauma itself: layered, broken, repaired. A pot can shatter, and be mended. It is a perfect metaphor for survival.

Silencing by Association

In 2022, I was scheduled to speak at Ceramic Art London, presenting the outcome of a years-long collaboration with women@thewell, a women-only service supporting those seeking to exit prostitution. My contribution included interviews and ceramic works that gave voice to stories of escape, pain, and hope. Just days before the event, I was informed that my talk and display were cancelled. I was also banned from the building for the duration of the weekend.

Organisers cited a “threat” of protest. But internal legal disclosures later confirmed there was no such threat. The decision was not based on what I planned to say, nor on the work itself. It was based on what I was believed to think, specifically, my “gender-critical” views: that biological sex matters and that women should be free to define their own realities. I was not there to speak about gender. I was there to speak about women in the sex trade. That didn’t matter.

What emerged in the disclosures was deeply unsettling. The organiser at University of the Arts London (UAL), which hosted the event, had previously gone to significant lengths to appease a trans rights activist in his department, even covering up students’ work so she wouldn’t be offended. Despite this, tensions remained. Fearing a protest like the unrelated sit-in that had occurred the previous year, he pushed for my removal - not based on any concrete risk, but on personal fear.

It had taken a team of seven people to gather “evidence” and exert pressure on the Craft Potters Association (CPA) to have me removed. Much of this effort revolved around monitoring my social media. What shocked me most was how routine this surveillance had become. Reporting colleagues for holding the “wrong” views - on gender, in this case - seemed not only accepted but expected. I was appalled by how many people had “snitched,” including one artist represented in the same gallery as me.

This was not my first experience of being excluded. In 2019, I had another event cancelled due to my abolitionist stance, my opposition to the sex trade. But this time, the silence was worse. Eleven other speakers presented at Ceramic Art London. Not one acknowledged what had happened. Not one voiced concern that a fellow artist had been silenced. The institutions involved - UAL and the CPA, my professional body, chose appeasement over integrity.

A Culture of Self-Censorship

My decision to take legal action was not about money. The fee in question was £200, most of which would have been spent setting up the display anyway. I took the case because I needed to speak. I needed to break the silence. I needed to challenge what I can only describe as a suffocating new orthodoxy, a kind of Gender Theology that has taken root in the UK arts world, transforming it into something resembling a theocracy.

The most insidious form of censorship we now face is not public, it’s private. It is self-censorship. Artists are increasingly fearful of voicing dissent, of straying from the accepted script. They worry not only about being “cancelled,” but about losing community, gallery space, commissions, or even the right to speak in their own professional forums. And so, they say nothing. The chilling effect is real. The arts - once a place where boundary-breaking was celebrated - are becoming stiflingly orthodox.

The silencing is especially sharp when it comes to women. After centuries of exclusion, women are finally gaining platforms in the arts. Yet now we are told we must not speak certain truths about our bodies, our experiences, or the exploitation of other women. The struggle for women’s rights has been co-opted by those who seek to erase the very categories that allowed us to organise in the first place. And if we resist, we are labelled dangerous.

A Personal Cost, A Public Stand

In 2023, I reached a legal settlement and received a public apology. But it came at a steep personal cost. My reputation suffered. I faced public shaming, professional isolation, and intense emotional strain. Even so, I have no regrets. The case wasn’t just about me. It was about standing up for the right to think freely and speak openly, for every artist who dares to explore difficult truths.

And I’m not alone. More and more artists, women and men alike, are quietly resisting the pressure to conform. They’re drawing a line, not out of defiance, but out of love for the integrity of their work. Art cannot serve as an instrument of ideology. It must remain a space for honesty, tension, and risk.

The Real Threat to Art

What happened to me in 2022, when my talk at Ceramic Art London was cancelled, was not an isolated event. It reflects a broader and more troubling trend: the erosion of creative freedom. The arts are being squeezed by a new orthodoxy, one that punishes deviation not with loud bans, but with subtle exclusions and silent fear.

We’re at a turning point. If we don’t defend the space for dissent, we risk losing everything that gives art its force: its capacity to unsettle, to challenge, to illuminate what others refuse to see. The danger isn’t always overt censorship. Sometimes, it’s the quiet voice that says: better not.