This is a new and quite a broad idea I am considering. I felt really useless after the war in Ukraine started. My family and I have tried helping as much as possible, having refugee woman from Ukraine and her daughter stay at our family home in Warsaw, helping a ukraininan family in London build a home from donations, which we have helped to collect from our neighbourhood. I do feel that was a “good deed” but nothing significant in terms of the larger reprecussions the war in Ukraine is having on refugee mothers who were forced to leave the country and their husbands/fathers of their children having to stay behind and fight in the war.
Working with refugee women/mothers: I would like to find/contact/interview artists who work with refugee women and see if I could get some information about their experience. To me thinking about how difficult it is a mother in just “normal” conditions, in a country where there is a standard of care and families are not torn apart, I then wonder how insanely difficult it must be for someone, who had to leave their country, with their child, while their husband was forced to stay and be prepared to go to war. I saw a video of a couple saying goodbye in Ukraine and the woman getting on a bus with children and it absolutely tore my heart out. I am now thinking about the ukraininan and iranian women and women in similar situations in other countries and simply wondering: is there any way in the world their trauma and the way their mental health has been affected, can there be a way for repair for them? I am thinking of Bourgeios and her quote about “sewing is repair” and realising how my grandmother was a single mother, how, especially by the end of her life, I almost always saw her sewing and how her life was far from perfect. Women need collective actions to get better, in London there are choir singing workshops organised for post natal depression, there are sewing and knitting circles. I want to inspire repair with my pieces, which require collective making: dancing, drawing, sewing and telling/sharing stories, and I think it’s going to be a very long process, which will require a lot of planning and making sure it is done in consideration of the refugees and their wellbeing. But I would like to make more lamps, where each lamp tells a story of one mother, where the mother draws on vellum(maybe she drew her child dancing) and then she pours water on the vellum and shapes the lamp on a torso and stitches it together. It would have her name written on it and when it’s being displayed it should tell the story of that particular person who made it. Ideally I would like to be able to sell the lamps and hopefully use the profit made from the sales to help these women and their children.
After an inspiring and exciting chat with Betty I want to talk to Amanda Cavenisch and Therese Weston and Katarzyna Perlak and see how their work might give me an insight into working with the refugee women and get them on board (Betty mentioned the Ukrainian Church near Bond Street) to building a plan, which would involve understanding a structure of charity work and facilitating the process considering the delicate nature of the refugees.
I feel another aspect of this feeling close to me is the diasporic experience for me and the way it might resonate with that experience for the ukrainian mothers living in the UK and in Poland. I do feel the situation of ukrainian refugees in Poland has significantly worsened in the past few years and to find out how much it has woersened I feel there is a need for further research. I can see how this project could form the basis for a Phd research as two years is definitely not enough to answer all the questions I need to ask to finalise this project. I feel very passionate and excited about this.
Actually, inspired by a conversation with a friend, who works for Deep Mind, who was just patiently listening to me blabbing about all my ideas and I guess possibly asking some “open ended questions” I was wondering whether it might be a good idea to write a program that I could use to send out to various charities to collaborate with them. I am so completely and utterly heartbroken by what is happening in Iran, to men and women, wo are trying to fight for freedom from terrorist dictatorship. I want to interview a fantastic artist Fa Razavi, but not sure about the idea as I am worried about her safety. At the same time I am remembering my September 2025 Fringe Warsaw exhibition at Norblin and the best thing that came out of that exhibition, which was a collaboration with Wielozmysły Foundation’s Natalia Szemis(www.wielozmysly.org), who made an appointment with me for an artist curated visit for the Warsaw Mental Hospital Day Ward patients. On the day of the visit about 20 people came with Natalia, and walked around with me and looked at every single one of the 28 pieces from my exhibition and were very interested in every single one of them and asked a lot of questions about the meaning behind them, the reason I created them and were inspired by the fact the pieces were created on Layers and revealed various layers of the dancer’s personality. They were then invited to draw their own pieces on layers of vellum and to tell me about them when they finished. I think they felt quite inspired and creatively connected after this visit. I am now wondering if I might try and work with refugee mothers whose mental health has been severely affected by the conflict in their home countries and find a way for them to work with me and collectively, by telling their stories through drawing on vellum, making the vellum drawings into lamps, sewing them together and exhibiting them for other people, who might be touched by their stories.