Dreaming Sanctuary: A Mural of Pride and Place in Collaboration with Crisis
On Queer Belonging, Diaspora, & Public Imagination: My Mural for Shop From Crisis & Crisis UK
This Pride Month, I was invited by Shop From Crisis’ to create a mural for their Peckham storefront, marking the launch of Crisis UK’s new campaign on homelessness - particularly as it affects queer, racialised, and displaced people. Dreaming Sanctuary is the result: a visual love letter to staying soft in systems that ask us to harden. Painted directly onto glass over three days, I used this work to explore how we build feeling when structure falls short - how we find sanctuary in the in-between.
mural installed on Shop From Crisis Peckham
Dreaming Through Displacement: Reimagining Sanctuary Without Walls
After spending some much needed time this year really stripping my practice back to its core, I realised that much of the work I do begins with a central question: what does home feel like when it’s not a place? For this mural, that question spilled out into public space - tapping on areas like borders, estrangement, housing precarity and generational rupture. I knew I wanted to approach this dreamscape a little differently, with more care than usual, to hold space for these symbols of such complex conditions. All the mock ups I drew kept surfacing recurring imagery - reaching hands, coded botanicals, unknown yet strangely familiar land. A lavendar sprig, once used a discreet queer signal became a gesture of tenderness and lingeage. The rainbow came through subconsciously, not as an afterimage of pride but a path towards it. So here sanctuary needed to feel less like a fixed place and more like a breath, one that doesn’t demand resolution but offers rest and recognition - an invitation into imagine sanctuary as something mobile, sensory and felt, rooted not in presence.
Softness as Resistance : A Political Aesthetic of Care
Once I refined the final mural sketch, it became clear to me that at it’s core Dreaming Sanctuary asks what it means to be held, seen, to belong even in the face of instability. Here this opens up wider conversations around softness as strategy, especially for black queer people - viewing it not as weakness but as a form of resistance. The figures in the mural aren’t standing tall or defending borders. They’re dreaming, resting, reaching and that in themselves are soft, vunerable yet radical acts; to permit oneself to imagine a world that doesn’t yet exist, but feel it anyway is how we claim life and trace possibility across new generations.
Letting Light Through: When the Mural Becomes a Space
One of the unexpected joys of this piece is how it interacts with the interior of the Crisis space. From inside, light filters through the colours, casting shifting hues and textures. When I came back to visit to take in the finished mural, I was taken aback by just how much it…resting perfectly beside yellow chairs, hung plants and rainbow pillows- these found details seamlessly became a part of the mural’s story. Even the reflections of passersby in the glass walking, stopping and entering the space reinforced how sanctuary should be collective. Through capturing that moment, Dreaming Sanctuary wasn’t merely just sitting on top of Crisis’ Window, it had become a part of it’s atmosphere.
Reflections on Place: Black Queer Dreaming as World-Building
Dreaming Sanctuary is not just about the mural itself - it’s about who it’s for. It’s an offering to the Black queer people who dream of home in fragments. Who reassemble belonging from memory, feeling, and chosen family. This mural holds those dreams. It doesn’t fix crisis but aims to softens its edge. It says: you can rest here. You are not alone. And in that way, it is a kind of architecture, not of buildings but of possibility.
Listen Whilst You Dream
While painting Dreaming Sanctuary, I curated a playlist of songs that held me through the process - soft, radical, expansive sounds for queer dreaming and diasporic reflection.
🎧 Listen to the Dreaming Sanctuary playlist
Overall, this project reminded me that public art doesn’t have to shout to be heard. It can whisper. It can glow softly on glass. It can hold space for those who don’t often see themselves reflected back.
Click here for my artist statement
