I don’t know if the people who read my Artist Diary know that I’m disabled. It’s a strange thing to say because, if you met me on the street, you probably wouldn’t know. My disability isn’t immediately visible. You might see me walking around London in my colourful clothes, with pink hair and a thousand ideas in my head, and have absolutely no idea.

A few years ago, I was healthy. Then illness came into my life and changed it completely. There is much more I want to say about that, about what it means to suddenly find yourself living in a body that works differently from the one you have known all your life. But that is another story, and I think I will tell it soon. Today, I want to tell you about a piece of copper.

Today was my first day at a jewellery-making course. I had signed up months ago and I had been waiting for it to start with ridiculous excitement. I already had ideas in my head: rings, earrings, things I wanted to experiment with, things I wanted to create. I had never done traditional jewellery-making before. A new adventure in front of me.

I woke up ridiculously happy. I felt like a little girl on her first day of school. Then came the first exercise. Not the third week. Not some complicated technique halfway through the course. The first exercise.

We had to cut a small piece of copper with a jeweller’s saw. One hand had to hold the metal firmly against the wooden bench pin while the other moved the saw. Simple. Except my hand couldn’t do it. I couldn’t grip the copper tightly enough to keep it still. The more I tried, the more my hand hurt. My grip has been getting worse over time, so I already knew there was a problem there, but somehow I had never connected it to jewellery-making. Until that exact moment.

And suddenly my disability hit me straight in the face. I remember thinking: No. No, no, no. Not this as well. Please, not this as well. I had been so excited about that course. I already deal with my body deciding what I can and cannot do far more often than I would like. I didn’t want it to take this away from me too.

And then came the embarrassment. The other people could see that I was struggling. I knew I was going to have to explain. I was going to have to say that I was disabled, that I have an illness, that my hand wasn’t simply tired or weak that morning. I physically couldn’t hold that piece of copper in the way I was supposed to.

So I told my teacher. I explained that I have a disability, that my hand was hurting too much and that I simply couldn’t grip the metal firmly enough to keep it in place. She was incredibly kind about it. Instead of using the saw, we found another solution and cut the copper with a metal-cutting guillotine. Problem solved. At least, that problem.

Because while my teacher was moving around the room helping the other students, I was sitting there thinking: What the fuck am I going to do? She explained to me that jewellery-making can actually be very physically demanding. I genuinely hadn’t known that when I enrolled. And suddenly I started wondering whether I had made a mistake.

For a moment, I seriously considered giving up. I thought I could go downstairs to reception, explain that I was disabled and physically unable to do some of the work, and ask whether they could move me to another course. Something easier on my body. Something I could do.

And then another thought arrived: No. Fucking no. Not yet.

I’m not pretending that determination magically makes disability disappear. It doesn’t. There are things my body cannot do anymore, and wanting them badly enough does not suddenly make them possible. Sometimes I have to stop. Sometimes I have to change plans. Sometimes my illness wins the argument whether I like it or not. But before I give this up, I want to know whether there is another way.

So I started asking questions. Could we use a clamp to hold the copper instead of making my hand do it? We tried one, but it was too big. Could I use different tools? Could I alternate techniques so that I’m not putting pressure on the same part of my body for too long? My teacher was completely open to finding adaptations with me.

And slowly my question changed. It stopped being Can I do jewellery-making? and became How can I do jewellery-making with the body I have?

I don’t know the answer yet. Maybe I’ll need clamps. Maybe I’ll need different tools. Maybe there will be techniques I simply cannot use and others I can adapt. Maybe I’ll end up developing a completely different way of working from the one I imagined when I signed up. I have no idea. But I want to find out.

And sitting there in that classroom made me realise something else. Maybe I need to talk about disability more openly in my work. ULY KHAOS itself grew during my illness. Art entered my life in a different way when I was spending huge amounts of time in bed, and art therapy became one of the things that helped my mental health. From there came more experiments, more ideas, more curiosity, and eventually this strange multidisciplinary creature I’m building now.

So perhaps hiding the disability from that story doesn’t make much sense. It affects how much I can work. It affects when I can work. And, as I discovered yesterday with one tiny piece of copper, sometimes it affects how I can create. Maybe those adaptations will become part of my creative process too.

I don’t want to romanticise that. Today hurt. It hurt physically — my hand and arm were still painful afterwards — but it also hurt emotionally. I had walked into that classroom ridiculously excited and, within the first exercise, I was confronted with another thing my body couldn’t do in the way I expected it to.

For a moment, I crashed. That happens. I crash. I get angry. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I think, Seriously? Another fucking thing? And then, when I can, I react. That is probably the thing that helps me most. Not pretending I’m fine. Not pretending I have peacefully accepted everything that has happened to me. I haven’t. But after the crash, I try to look at whatever is in front of me and ask: Okay. What can I do with this? Is there another way?

Yesterday, the answer was a guillotine. Tomorrow it might be a clamp. Next week, who knows.

But one thing is certain: I’m not going to let my illness stop me from finding my own way to make that ring.