At the heart of this body of work sits the Collateral Beauty Series – my long-form love story to Luton, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. First launched at Wardown House, Museum & Gallery, the series began as one story explored in three ways – poetry, play and prose – and has grown into a constellation of books and performances that keep circling the same question: what does it mean to be a young Black woman making a life in a town that the outside world often misreads?

The story that runs through the series follows Libby, a young Black woman from Luton, as she navigates grief, belonging, ambition and self‑discovery. She is trying to become all she wants to become while the world keeps handing her scripts that do not fit; trying to find a changeless sense of who she is in a country that keeps shifting the goalposts; trying to trace where she has come from and to reach the place she knows, deep down, she is meant to go. The work holds the tension between being visible and being truly seen.

This story has taken different forms

Each page asks a simple but radical question: what happens if we dare to see Luton, and Black Bedfordshire lives, as beautiful on their own terms? The series is an invitation to look again – at this town, at these stories, and at all the shades of Blackness that live beyond the stereotypes, standing in their own unfiltered colour.

An earlier visual art exhibition, called “Fifty Shades of Black”, walked these same streets and questions in another medium – using images and installation to push beyond the flattened “media‑ready” idea of Black identity. The books, play and children’s stories carry that same impulse forward: to refuse one-note Blackness and instead dwell in all the overlooked details – the sound of a mum calling you in from the balcony, the smell of rice and peas in a council kitchen, the way Luton’s sky looks before Carnival, the ache of being the only one in the room and the relief when you finally are not.

The works connected to My Life In Colour sit alongside the wider Words Chose Me and NINE RED Presents… (CIC) ecosystem – the Ballad of Bedfordshire, community anthologies, installations and performance. Together they hold space for Black Bedfordshire lives on the page and on the stage. Taken as a whole, they offer a love letter to Luton, a complicated mirror, and a set of keys for anyone who has ever felt that their version of “Black” didn’t quite match the label.