Artists are often told not to look back — that retrospection is stagnation, that archives are mausoleums, that forward motion is the only respectable posture. But for feminist artists, the archive is not a graveyard.
It is a universe.
A constellation.
A machine of time.
History has rarely given women the dignity of continuity. Our stories appear in fragments, footnotes, scandals, sidebars, moral warnings. Our work is often lost, misattributed, unrecorded, or buried beneath male narratives of genius. To build an archive as a woman — particularly as a feminist, punk-influenced, countercultural artist — is not nostalgia.
It is infrastructure.
It is immortality engineering.
An archive is a rebellion against erasure.
My own archive spans decades: punk squats, Brighton counterculture, moving-image experiments, performance personas, erotic writings, glitch art, AI aesthetics, feminist essays, and the vast interconnected world of Immersion. To watch these fragments accumulate is to witness myself forming across multiple temporal layers — a geological record of becoming.
Digital technology changes the politics of archiving entirely. Everything becomes sediment: a blog post, a 20-year-old newspaper clipping, a corrupted JPEG, a podcast episode, a broken link preserved by the Wayback Machine. These digital ruins form a new kind of feminist time — nonlinear, fractal, excessive.
Patriarchy prefers linear time:
girl → woman → mother → obsolete.
But feminist archival time spirals.
It loops.
It contradicts itself.
It refuses neat developmental narratives.
In this temporal architecture, the personas of the past are still alive.
Pasha du Valentine is not a former identity; she is an active time-sigil.
The Countess is not a phase; she is an ongoing commentary.
Early punk Sarnia is not the beginning; she is one of many gravitational centres.
The archive does not preserve these selves; it activates them.
To engage with one’s own archive as an artist is to acknowledge that the self is a constellation rather than a singular point. A feminist artist is a multi-bodied creature moving across time, leaving traces, signatures, ruptures, disruptions. These traces form a map — not a map of where you have been, but a map of the forces that shaped you.
Archiving becomes a metaphysical act:
A way of speaking to your past and future selves simultaneously.
A way of ensuring you cannot be written out.
A way of constructing your own afterlife.
Digital immortality is not a fantasy of futurism; it is already happening.
Search engines are proto-oracles.
Blogs are living museums.
Podcasts are preserved breath.
YouTube Shorts are fragments of performance trapped in infinite loops.
Every scan, every press clipping, every glitch-video is a shard of identity suspended in virtual amber.
The feminist archive is not passive.
It has teeth.
It has agency.
It tells the world:
“I was here.
I am here.
I will continue to be here, whether you acknowledge me or not.”
Archives destabilise patriarchal time by refusing to disappear.
In my own work, the archive is both studio and stage. It informs new work, feeds new theories, resurrects old personas, builds bridges between punk adolescence and digital futurism. It collapses decades into a single aesthetic ecosystem — from the London squats to the Brighton Arts Club to Immersion and beyond.
The archive is not the past.
It is a living organism.
A cosmos made of noise and memory.
A feminist universe with its own physics.
And inside that universe, every woman who has ever been erased, dismissed, overlooked, misnamed, or forgotten finds a place to echo — loudly, endlessly, defiantly — into the future.
