Touchlines of Fortitude exhibition I

Gina DeCagna

​After experiencing burnout, I started slowing down and building up habits of noticing nature again, and connecting to it — to both return to and nurture my inner self. 

Resilience is about holding onto your core self, values, dreams and visions, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Female resilience, for me, is doing this in a society that is patriarchal, hyper-capitalist, and continually employing extractionist techniques that devalue. 

Whilst being protected and feeling safe within nature, I feel I can access these raw components of who I am. 

These art pieces are more than landscapes. They depict scenes of foliage in the wooded park nearest my childhood home, which I still visit to this day in order to gain clarity within my thoughts, and to feel safe and protected whilst doing so. In that sense, they show touches of my interiority, interlacing with the exterior natural world.

Agnieszka Lokaj

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of what female strength and resilience means, how they can take many different forms, and why they matter. In 2024, when I was made redundant, it was a life-changing moment for me in terms of exploring and rediscovering my own strength and sense of self-belief. Painting and creativity gave me a much needed boost to my confidence and mental health. 

As someone with ADHD, I’m very aware of how my emotions around anxiety, self-esteem and my feelings of imposter syndrome affect all aspects of my life, including my art. So, focusing purely on exploring my creative side really did wonders for my wellbeing. 

In today’s world, we all need ways to process our emotions, build confidence, and feel supported. Creative expression and physical activity – moving our bodies through sport – can offer us this. They give us a chance to reflect, release, and reconnect with ourselves and those around us.

My works for Touchlines of Fortitude have been inspired by England’s Red Roses and the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup, because they represent so much more than sport. Rugby is a powerful metaphor for resilience, strength, and teamwork — qualities that women embody both on and off the pitch.

Through my paintings, I want to capture the energy, courage, and solidarity that women’s rugby brings into focus, while also celebrating the broader stories of female empowerment, and endurance. The 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup offers a global stage where these qualities are visible and can be celebrated — my art translates that same spirit into visual form, offering viewers an emotional and reflective way to connect with those themes.

I had the opportunity to see the Red Roses train, so I naturally took my sketch book to find inspiration. I wanted to capture the sense of their strength, their power, their energy, their confidence, and their speed – and the emotion of how it feels to watch them as a spectator. This is what it means to see true strength in motion.