We Must Not Speak of It (2025)

We Must Not Speak of It is one of the most arresting and politically charged pieces within The Damnation Project. Six women, their faces eerily similar, press their hands over their mouths. The gesture, half forced, half resigned, turns silence into ritual. Their skin is smeared with a black, tar-like substance that seeps from their fingers and lips, fusing them in quiet revolt. Each figure appears mid-exhale, suffocating beneath the weight of something unspoken, as though the act of covering one’s mouth has become instinct rather than command.

⤷ This work distills the central horror of systemic silencing into a single, suffocating image. The women seem to merge, their boundaries dissolving in the shared act of repression. They are not individuals but echoes—variations of the same body forced to obey. The darkness around them feels heavy and tactile, like a room filled with breath that cannot escape.

Visually, the piece draws on chiaroscuro and Flemish religious composition, but its language is wholly modern. It references the historical repression of women’s voices—through religion, domesticity, and art itself—while exposing how that same violence still manifests under new names. The black residue can be read as rot, oil, ink, or sin: all forms of contamination born from the refusal to listen.

Emotionally, the painting vibrates between solidarity and despair. The women seem bound by shared trauma, but their silence is also communion—proof that they have seen, and survived, what cannot yet be said. Cox renders them with tenderness even as she condemns their condition, creating a tableau that feels sacred, terrifying, and unbearably human.