“this is the woman
that raised Chérie
and I am
the woman that bore her”

What does ‘motherhood’ mean to someone who was taken from their mother? What does ‘blackness’ mean to someone deprived of their culture? And how does someone reassemble themselves after being torn apart by racist and relationship abuse?

Lioness brings together the broken pieces of a life lived always as ‘other’, celebrating the cracks and fissures in the same way that the Japanese art of kintsugi honours a damaged pot with gold lacquer, transforming its imperfections and fractures into strength, beauty and truth.