painting a mural in prison aka: a little bit of orange in hell
It’s April 2025, I am spreading lilac paint across the walls of the prison segregation yard, locked inside 20 foot high metal barriers. Razor wire lines the edges of our cage like the sharp icing on the cake. I hold a 3-foot striker brush that looks like the head of a giant electric toothbrush. I press paint into the solid metal but it’s drying faster than I can spread it. The April heat evaporates the muddy water from my brush and the metal heats us up like an oven. Now I know why Laura refers to the seg yard as hell. I don’t know when I’ll be let out again.
This isn’t how I imagined maternity leave.
Me and Natasha from LSOM putting the ground sheets down for painting.
In January 2025, I had a six-month-old baby and barely an hour to myself. Still, I’d signed up for a collaborative muralism course run by Patricio Forrester at Goldsmiths uni in Deptford. I’d put myself forwards to co-design a mural with women at HMP Downview, a women’s prison without really thinking about the logistics. It would mean a 5 hour round trip from my home in the Midlands, but how often do you get invited into one of the most restricted places on earth to paint a mural? To bring something creative and free into a place built on rules, control, routine and repetition felt like a necessity. I have no idea how Patricio made it happen but with tenacity and perseverance, the project went ahead.
Entry into the prison felt exactly how you’d imagine.
Metal detectors. ID checks. Buzzers. Keys jangling from heavy belts. Doors that locked behind you before another would open. As soon as I crossed the threshold, I felt an invisible weight of tension and anxiety on my back. I was a free person but I was locked in to. I saw trees in perfectly manicured lawns and it struck me that even the nature here was caged.
We spent three days in the education centre with the women, co-designing the mural. We were different in every obvious way; backgrounds, accents, ethnicity, opportunity. I felt guilty at my own life, I knew nothing of the struggles and barriers these women were facing and had paid…opted to go there as part of my own life experience which felt somewhat wrong, like going to a zoo or a war memorial. I tried to think of myself as a facilitator, there to bring an experience to the women, to create a space for ideas, drawing, painting and self expression. They made us feel really welcome.
One woman told me she came to the session because it was the only place she’d be allowed to draw freely on a piece of paper. Even pencils are rationed in prison. They passed notes to each other under the table with a cheeky, classroom energy that radiated. It felt more like school than anything else.
The view in the seg yard from behind the locked door
I had no idea what to expect from this place. Everything I thought I knew about prison came from TV—Orange is the New Black, 24 Hours in Police Custody, Bridget Jones! Laura later told us we were given a relatively ‘together group’ for the workshops. From her accounts, inmates are victims, troubled souls who’ve suffered difficult lives. But the women we did meet were kind, gentle, funny and articulate.
On our 4th trip to the prison we began to paint. Six students from the course. Three residents from the prison. I will never know what brought them there but in getting to know them I found out about possible release dates, 3 months for one, 4 years for another and I rallied on their side, hoping for smooth passage through the bureaucracy that lay ahead.
We built a rhythm together, layering soft pinks, purples, yellows and blues onto hot metal, painting softness into rigidity.
As the mural came to life, we lightened too. I could hear the weight of a project this size lift off Patricio’s shoulders as he started singing Spanish songs in the sun. We were doing it! The difficult, impossible thing was happening and it felt incredible.
One afternoon we found out Laura was a writer. She wrote in her cell after each mural workshop and asked us if she could read to us in the yard. She took centre stage on the concrete and we sat crossed legged in the yard, laying down our paint brushes to watch. I thought it must’ve been the first time anyone ever performed in that bleak patch of land.
The design we were painting was a colourful paper mountainscape, designed as a visual escape for the prisoners in seg…only Laura saw something else. She described the “paper mountains” of prison: charge sheets, parole decisions, nicking slips, arrest warrants. Mountains made of bureaucracy and judgment. She liked our painting and felt protective over it, but the paper mountains of law reminded me, you never know how someone else’s will view a piece of art. But that mural made me understand her experience a little bit more…how sheets of paper had dictated her life to bring her there in the first place.
She also told us she didn’t know anything about colour theory but she spoke about colour like she knew it personally.
“It is a little jarring to see a thing of beauty right down here near the bottom of hell. That’s why it needs a bit of orange. Orange is a little bit naughty. We won’t have any orange in heaven we won’t need it then. But you need a bit of orange in hell. Orange is conscious, and bright, and brave. Orange survives.”
“Few people are in prison because they’re really bad or dangerous or evil,” she said.
“Most of us are here because society is evil, and we’ve had horrible lives. We’re victims in here. Tangibly, if not visibly damaged.”
I looked up at the sky beyond. The clouds framed in razor scribbles floated past freely. No one can cage a cloud. But you can cage grass and a tree and people. I wondered what this land was before the concrete, before it was measured and monitored and surveilled.
As we painted and found our rhythms we started painting more instinctively and found that moment where you can paint and chat and laugh without really thinking. Giggling away, giddy from the heat and surreal environment, and laughing because we are free, we got told off. “This is a serious place,” the officer said. Laughter wasn’t allowed. We carried on giggling at being told off like being back at school. Funny how you adopt the ‘us and them’ attitude being in prison for a day. I felt fully allied to the women and annoyed by the guards with their rules and keys.
One of our group Manda was incredibly spiritual. She drew a labyrinth in my notebook. I’ve never seen one before but the idea is you use your finger to trace the path in and then back out again once you meet the middle. You can draw them on sand and use them for meditation. Manda told us that through painting, we were putting our positive energy into the walls, which other people will feel, they won’t be able to help it, it’ll radiate back out at them. I really hope she’s right.
Manda’s Labyrinth
