​First, there’s the archive of my childhood, which I inherited from my grandmother. She was an avid amateur photographer — she had a Zenit camera, tons of film, and used to develop the photos herself. Our family ended up with a huge collection of black-and-white pictures of me and my sister as kids, dressed up in all sorts of funny ways. My grandmother would stage us like little models: sometimes I’d be in curlers with my mum’s beads around my neck, sometimes I’d be holding a phone receiver almost bigger than me, or posing seriously under the Christmas tree. I must’ve looked through those stacks of photo albums a thousand times — they were always part of my world.

But it was only in London that I suddenly realised how deeply they’d shaped my visual language. My main artistic references don’t come from museums or books — they come from that family photo archive. That’s where my inspiration lives. The nostalgic, ghostly quality of analogue photography seeps into my painting too.
 

Second, I now have a son of my own — and like any modern mum, I’ve got thousands of photos of him on my phone, capturing all sorts of moments and stages of his life. When I moved away to study and we were apart, I missed him terribly and kept scrolling through our media library — videos, snapshots, everything. And then it hit me: this is a treasure trove. Every single image is full of emotion, atmosphere, story.

I started using these photos of my son as the basis for large-scale paintings. What began as an everyday habit — documenting my child — suddenly grew into a whole new artistic project.
 

Now, my child has become the main character in my work — and through him, I explore myself too. It’s turned into a kind of mother-and-child dialogue, but not in the usual sentimental way. I’m interested in the existential side of it. There’s this strange duality: here’s this small human who literally grew inside me for nine months — and now he’s his own person. I see echoes of myself in him, and of my mum, and of my grandmother — genetics really is wild — and yet he’s entirely himself.
 

That paradox of deep connection and total separateness completely fascinates me. In my paintings, the figures often come out semi-transparent, the faces blurred. Sometimes I even physically alter the materials — I might wet or partly wash off the watercolour after it’s dried, or tear the edge of the canvas. The result is this ghostly quality, like a memory that’s about to slip away. What matters to me is capturing the fragility of the moment — the fleeting, elusive nature of memory.