Leak (2025)

Leak is perhaps Cox’s most viscerally arresting piece, a confrontation with the collapse of silence. A woman stares outward, mouth open in a soundless scream, as a torrent of black fluid pours from her throat and down her body. Her hand, trembling yet insistent, forces the substance upward, as though she’s both the victim and the source of her own purge. Her skin glows in muted amber light, making the act feel holy, obscene, and utterly human all at once.

⤷ This painting operates on the edge between horror and catharsis. Where We Must Not Speak of It was about repression. Leak is the moment the repression ruptures. The darkness inside the woman is not invading her; it’s escaping. The composition’s simplicity is what gives it such weight: there are no surrounding figures, no context, only the raw, solitary act of expulsion. It’s not possession. It’s release.

Cox’s use of chiaroscuro isolates the figure in a void of judgment and illumination. The woman’s eyes, wide, terrified, confront the viewer with unbearable honesty. She is not performing. She is caught in the act of transformation. The black substance, so often present throughout The Damnation Project, becomes a symbol of truth made physical: the ugliness of what one was forced to swallow, finally returning to the world that demanded her silence.

Leak reads as both confessional and reclaiming. It evokes trauma’s aftermath—the way purging pain can resemble self-destruction—and how expression itself can be mistaken for madness. Cox doesn’t aestheticize the act but rather frames it as sacred disobedience: the refusal to contain what festers.