You Took My Joy (and I want it back) A Maidens Garland 2025 (With thanks to Lucinda Williams for the song.) Having received a Lucky Dip bursary from aspace arts earlier in the year I am making work based on an old English funerary custom of honouring a persons virginity (usually a woman or girl) by making a Virgins Crown or Maidens Garland from willow and ribbons and paper rosettes and gloves, carrying it alongside the funeral procession and hanging it in the church rafters unless it is challenged of course. Mine, made from bent willow, tea-stained sheets, string, summer grass, slits and stitchery is reminiscent of a bird cage and inside hang seven bronze clitorii like strange fruit or caged birds. It is a comment on virginity as a social construct, the language and attitudes around it and in particular Female Genital Mutilation as the ultimate brutality in trying to maintain it. It is still a WIP but will be exhibited at Gods House Tower in Southampton in the autumn along with the other Lucky Dip artists work.