MONOLITH

Mixed Media, 2025

“Some of my enemies may be here, if there be, I freely forgive them and all the world and I hope the world will forgive me.”

— George Mellor, Luddite, executed 8th January 1813

This piece is not made for display. It’s not decoration. It’s stitched by hand more than 200 years later in the same bloodline, the same barriers, the same spirit of resistance, remembrance and unfinished work. MONOLITH exists as a quiet act of defiance—an object built to hold memory.

At its core is the final statement of my ancestor George Mellor, a Luddite leader executed at just 23 years old. These were his last words—offered not with rage or resistance, but with a radical kind of grace. Words spoken by someone scapegoated by a system built to protect power and punish defiance.

This work wasn’t made for May 1st, but it’s released in solidarity. International Workers’ Day marks the ongoing struggle of labour against exploitation. The Luddites—skilled artisans, not backward saboteurs—laid early foundations for the workers’ rights movements that followed. Their resistance has been deliberately misremembered. MONOLITH challenges that rewriting.

I don’t present this work as a monument to a hero, but as a reminder: resistance is often ordinary. Quiet. Costly. George Mellor didn’t get to shape the narrative. MONOLITH is my attempt to hold space for what was erased. It does not smooth history over—it keeps those scars visible.

Like much of my work, this piece honours the stories passed down without fanfare: the protest, the sacrifice, the refusal to be broken. It speaks to anyone who has been punished not for what they did—but for who they refused to become.