🔗 Share this article

“I am a teenager growing up during an age with war, dishonesty, prejudice, racial bias, sexism. Yet few seems angry by these issues. People see minor progress in social equality as solutions to our issues completely though that falls short.”

It’s March 2015, and I’ve done it I’ve solved inequality. Present in the basement room at an Oxford art venue during a local round of the Articulation prize, I was convinced that perhaps I just introduced the audience with adults and educators to the idea of feminism. I felt proud of my performance.

The Contest

This speaking award is a competition for post-GCSE students, aged 16 to 19, who are given a brief period to deliver on a work of art they select. I learned regarding this by my head of my college, and his room I frequently visited just weeks before the competition. As a pupil, I was clever but chatty and easily distracted. I felt everything acutely and was frequently emotional and upset.

My approach was an all-or-nothing perspective on academics: excel completely or don’t bother. During our meeting, we discussed my decision to drop a history course soon after beginning it thinking it impossible it would be possible completing it top graded. “Not everything about extremes,” he implored.

A Chance

Along with my longsuffering art instructor, the head of sixth form recognised that Articulation was the perfect chance that I needed – after all I enjoyed art studies, and proved gobby as part of the school’s rag-tag debate club. He proposed I develop a talk for an initial school-level round. From memory, it seems no one else participated.

Choosing Art

My presentation focused on the artist’s pharmacy installations, which I had seen at his 2012 retrospective at Tate Modern (a related print remains posted on my wall behind my desk). I’d seen his creations for the first time as a child in north Devon, the north Devon town where my grandmother had grown up, and where Hirst had a restaurant, its name, featuring preserved fish, and wallpaper covered in pills. I loved that the art seemed funny and contrarian, that he successfully labeling anything as artistic. It amused me my relative disapproved. But maybe most of all, I loved that, since the artwork took titles from after tracks from a punk record, I was going to say “The word” (Pistols) several times in my speech. I felt like the most radical teen mind among my peers.

The Outcome

During the local round, there were nine other speakers, all of whom more refined cultural context, offered less unqualified, sweeping statements, and said “bollocks” rarely. I was awarded the bronze position. For a teen who put almost all self-esteem on achievement, typically this meant a devastating outcome. Yet then, that people people seemed to enjoy, and had laughed precisely where I had wanted, proved sufficient.

Fresh Directions

When Articulation invited me to give my talk again, this time as part of an event in London, I submitted my paperwork to read art history at university. Prior to this, I had thought I was going to apply literature or languages, not considering at Oxbridge, where I knew I would never be “the best”. Yet the experience boosted my courage and made me believe that my opinions deserved expression, without knowing specialized terms. I no longer required to be the best: I just needed to add my perspective on things.

Finding Purpose

Discussing creativity – and learning how to make people laugh while I do it – quickly became my north star. This contest experience completed itself upon returning recently to be the first graduate judge of an Articulation heat.

The competition built my self-assurance beyond my degree choice: not that I would accomplish great things, but that I didn’t have to. I no longer needed to covet perfection; I needed to lean into my own voice. I transformed from nervous and fragile – passionate but quick to anger – to someone who believed in their capabilities. I didn’t need to be perfect. Initially, authenticity meant importance over ideal outcomes.

Appreciation

I remain thankful to the sixth-form head who made the effort to comprehend me when I was an obstinate and emotional teenager, rather than simply dismissing me (and, looking back, I think an eye roll might have been understandable). Not everything was absolute success or failure; I learned that it is often worth trying even without guarantees of “winning”.