This collage was created in response to one of the central arguments in Prof Ramona Vijeyarasa’s book, Rewriting the Rules, that the legal system, despite its origins within structures built by and for men, still holds unrealised potential for advancing gender equality. Rather than abandoning the law as inherently incapable of serving women, Prof Vijeyarasa urges us to imagine how legislation might meaningfully change if it were rewritten to reflect the everyday experiences of women. My collage is an attempt to visualise this invitation—to look again at the legal system, not as a monolith, but as a structure capable of transformation from within.

At the centre of the artwork stands a large glass cabinet filled with books, symbolising the current architecture of law. Some compartments remain fully intact, representing the aspects of the legal system that continue to operate as originally designed. In other areas, however, the glass has disappeared and the books themselves have begun to unravel, their pages shredded and spilling outward. These ruptures do not indicate the collapse of the system; instead, they signal an ongoing process of revision. By allowing the books to fray, the collage reflects Prof Vijeyarasa’s call for rewriting—not discarding—the rules. The exposed and reworked volumes reflect the labour required to craft legislation attentive to women’s lived realities.

Emerging from among these unravelled books are images of women engaged in daily tasks: caring for children, doing laundry, preparing food, grocery shopping. These scenes, positioned both within and around the cabinet, challenge the traditional division between the public and private spheres that has long shaped legal thinking. The law has historically focused on regulating public life—employment, education, political participation—while often neglecting the domestic and familial spaces where many gendered inequities originate and persist. By inserting these intimate, routine moments into the very structure that represents law, the collage underscores the necessity of bringing women’s private-sphere experiences into legislative consideration.

The women portrayed in the collage are intentionally drawn largely from the Global South. This choice responds to Prof Vijeyarasa’s critique of Western assumptions that countries outside the West are inherently or uniformly gender-unequal. Her work highlights examples in which legal innovations in the Global South have advanced gender equality in ways often overlooked or undervalued by Western scholarship. Including these women re-centres their experiences and contributions, suggesting that meaningful legal reform must be globally informed rather than unilaterally dictated from the West.

At the forefront of the collage stands a woman on a ladder, reaching into the transformed cabinet. She functions as the central protagonist, embodying the idea that women must be active participants in ‘rewriting the rules’ rather than merely subjects governed by them. Her upward movement gestures toward both aspiration and agency: the rewriting of law cannot occur without the voices and insights of women whose everyday realities the law seeks to address.

Together, these elements weave a visual reflection of Prof Vijeyarasa’s thesis—that the law, when reshaped through women’s experiences, can become a more just and inclusive tool for gender equality.