Current

This series is based on photos taken of the VE Day street celebrations on May 8, 1945.  Captured in the heart of East London, the images documented families emerging from six years of war, bombings, and evacuations—including my nine-year-old mother, accompanied by her parents: the direct ancestors of this visual narrative.

Each portrayed face has been reinterpreted through the expressive language of oil painting. The distortions, misalignments, and amplified gestures are not mistakes, but echoes of memory. Oil, with its slow pace, serves as an antithesis to the photographic instant: it transforms the fleeting into the meditative, allowing complex emotions such as relief, bewilderment, and joy to intertwine on the painted surface.

The series does not seek to imitate the historical archive, but to activate it. The painted faces not only tell a story of survival, but also invite an open emotional reading, where the intimate becomes universal. This dialogue between fixed image and sensitive stroke explores how memory is distorted—but never disappears.