Going Places | Young People’s Artworks

Eileen Cooper’s work explores identity, femininity, vulnerability, and the unspoken layers of the human experience. Her figures often feel suspended between strength and fragility. bodies that carry memory, silence, and survival. When I encountered her work, I didn’t just see paintings; I saw emotional truth. I saw what it means to exist in pieces, yet still take up space.

As someone who grew up in the care system, identity was never stable. It was written in reports, debated in meetings, and transferred between placements. My childhood often felt less like a life being nurtured and more like a decision being negotiated. Reading my care files as an adult, I found pages where adults argued over placement costs rather than my wishes, needs, or happiness. That discovery reshaped how I understood my past.

My art piece, “The Auction of Childhood,” responds directly to that experience. The imagery of a child presented like livestock, priced, assessed, and exchanged, reflects the dehumanisation I felt. It represents the moment I realised I had been treated as a financial liability before I was treated as a child. The circus-like exaggeration in the piece mirrors the absurdity of systems that claim protection while reducing children to numbers.

Like Cooper’s figures, my work centres the body as a site of a story. Her subjects often hold quiet tension, they are not passive, but they are marked by what they have endured. Similarly, my piece reclaims the narrative. What was once written about me in detached professional language becomes something raw, visual, and impossible to ignore.

Where Cooper explores the psychological interior of her figures, I expose the institutional exterior that shaped mine. Her work speaks of resilience within vulnerability; mine confronts the structures that required that resilience in the first place.

Together, the dialogue between our works becomes one about identity, who gets to define it, who gets to price it, and who ultimately reclaims it.

This piece is not just about childhood. It is about value. And the difference between being cared for, and being costed.