Memory, in the hands of a feminist artist, is never simply recollection. It is reclamation. Rewiring. A counter-history. A refusal to accept the official version of events — especially when the official version has no interest in us except as footnotes, victims, or background noise.
But noise, as punk taught me early in life, is never just background.
Noise is material.
Noise is language.
Noise is resistance.
When we speak of punk memory, we are not talking about nostalgia for studs, spit and cheap beer. Punk memory is a methodology: a way of remembering that is unpolished, uncurated, contradictory, feral. A memory that does not behave. A memory uninterested in being respectable.
Women in the punk scene learned early that our histories would not be recorded unless we recorded them ourselves. Gigs went undocumented. Friendships vanished into rumour. Survival stories disappeared beneath glamourised male narratives of chaos and genius. Women made the clothes, ran the houses, booked the gigs, did the labour — and were often written out of the official timeline.
So we built our own timelines.
Fragmented, unstable, loud.
And from that noise, a new form of feminist documentation emerged.
Punk, for me, was not merely a genre of music. It was a pedagogical environment. A feminist school disguised as squalor. It taught me that interference is a valid mode of communication. That disruption is a legitimate aesthetic. That community is not built through politeness but through shared refusal.
It also taught me this:
If you want to survive, you must remember yourself.
Today, when I revisit those early years — the London squats, the DIY co-operatives, the collision of subcultures — I understand them as formative feminist laboratories. Our lives were messy and contradictory because we were experimenting with identity under constant pressure. Poverty, trauma, addiction, violence — these were not romantic backdrops. They were structural forces, and we were navigating them with very little institutional support.
This is why punk memory matters.
It refuses to be smoothed over.
It retains the jaggedness of lived experience.
When I archive those years — through essays, performances, moving image, and persona-building — I am not mythologising them. I am refusing their erasure. Memory becomes a political aesthetic: damaged, electric, inconsistent, but utterly alive.
Punk also provided a feminist toolkit I still use in my work:
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Break the frame when the frame restricts you.
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Destroy hierarchy — even the artistic ones.
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Create without permission.
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Document everything. You never know what will remain.
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Be too much, too loud, too complicated.
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Treat beauty as an option, not an obligation.
These methods shape my digital art, my writing, my personas, my performance decisions. They shape the way I approach feminist theory — not as a static academic object, but as something unruly and embodied. Something that bleeds. Something that can scream or whisper or glitch on command.
Most importantly, punk memory reminds me that history is not linear.
It loops.
It distorts.
It accelerates.
It stutters like an overdriven speaker.
In a way, punk memory is a glitch — a rupture in the smooth surface of patriarchal narratives. It allows new meanings to emerge, new genealogies of women’s work to form. It lets us rewrite the script in ways that feel true to lived experience rather than institutional tidiness.
My feminist art practice is, in many ways, an ongoing conversation with that punk girl who refused to be silent or pretty or pleasant. She is still here, undercover. She insists on the right to remember the world on her own terms. She demands that the archive be loud enough to hear her.
And perhaps that is the real legacy of punk for feminist artists:
Refuse the clean version.
Refuse the official version.
Remember ferociously.
