In Choir Girl (2021) the viewer is confronted by a portrait of the artist dressed in the black and white chorister’s robes she wore as a child. Staring out at the viewer, Pettit is defiant. The subject of the paintings is from her own past when, as a 13-year-old choir girl, she was subjected to a shaming sexual encounter. The artist adopts the mechanisms of role play (‘I am wearing my younger self’, she has remarked), to lend emotional weight to pictorial symbolism and visibility to emotional trauma.

The Woman’s Weapon (2021) shows the artist’s raised tattooed arm, her hand tightly clutching a pair of scissors as if about to stab something outside the field of vision. A reference to female characters in horror movies whose preferred murder weapon is often scissors, Pettit’s painting seems to question why this comically ineffectual tool should consistently be associated with a female protagonist.

Pettit’s textile works draw on a history of craft with its attendant association with ‘women’s work’, and the methods of self-expression embedded in its traditional forms. Cocoon (2021), which combines the mediums of painting and textile, has a hallucinatory quality; a three dimensional painting-object that is uncanny in both structure and form. A painted self-portrait showing the back of the artist’s head and sunburnt shoulders, it includes an undulating black quilt – like a puffer jacket – hanging from the surface of the canvas. Allowing the image to escape into three-dimensional space, as if the artist is in the process of shrugging off her coat, Pettit blends illusory with real in one confounding gesture.

Two small circular, tondo-like textile paintings record intimate vignettes of the artist’s body, showing body parts viewed through a keyhole. Their pink and white fleshy tones sit in sharp contrast to the deep black of the surrounding framing device. The door that houses the keyhole is plump and soft to the touch contributing to a disquieting sense of voyeurism.

Two bloodied hands appear over the top of a quilt which takes the form of a knife but is also a door. Exquisitely rendered with precise stitching, it is both a picture and a three-dimensional object, structured and soft, its subject is ominous but its materiality welcoming and suggestive of comfort and warmth.