Handle With Care (2025)

Handle With Care portrays fragility in its quietest, most literal form. A woman in a pale dress lies curled inside a cardboard box lined with bubble wrap, her body folded to fit the space. Her head rests against the cardboard wall as if it were a pillow, her feet just brushing the edge of light. On the box’s side, a small printed label reads: Handle With Care.

⤷ Cox transforms the mundane into the sacred; an everyday object becomes a coffin, a cradle, a container for all the ways women are told to take up less space. The image is haunting in its restraint: there’s no violence, only submission shaped by exhaustion. The soft chiaroscuro and golden tones echo the tenderness of a Baroque lamentation, yet the modern context makes it unsettlingly relatable.

The painting speaks to burnout, emotional containment, and the delicate performance of resilience. It suggests how tenderness, when weaponised, becomes a cage.