We all come from women, and there's something extraordinary about the mothers who raised us.

Charity is a fine thing if it's meeting a gap where needs must be met and there are no other resources. But in the long term we need to support people into helping themselves.

Every artist has to make their own statements and they have to live with them.

I identify with other women because of my gender, and I identify with other women if they are mothers because I'm a mother, too. It's very simple. It's nothing complicated, it's not rocket science. It's about empathy. It's about understanding that what happens with one person is potentially what happens to you, and seeing yourself in someone else's shoes. Fundamentally, we are all in the same place: we're born, we live, and we're going to die. In between, we'll have joy and we'll have sadness.

The worst thing someone gets is isolated. Isolation is the darkest part of any condition. You can live with almost any condition if you're living within a community of people who can share a common understanding. We create these communities from women who share common conditions, and those mothers carry each other through.

There needs to be a shift in consciousness; there needs to be an absolute wake-up call before society can actually make the kind of incredibly significant changes that need to happen.

I was born in 1954. My parents were brought up in the war years, and life was hard.