Dark Night Where is Your Daughter

Dark Night Where is Your Daughter? (2022-2026). Against the raw, unhemmed expanse of natural linen, figures emerge from a single, unrelenting spectrum of red. The palette admits no other colour: every mark, every thread, every fragment of applied fabric exists within the range from pale blush to blood red, the work reads as a wound and a testimony, as a drawing and as a scar. The composition builds through complex layers — watercolour pencil, applied fabric, hand-stitched thread — each one visible and deliberate, accruing both physical relief and metaphorical depth as the surface lifts and gathers where materials accumulate, the histories the work carries pressing upward through the cloth. Watercolour pencil traces the first outlines and over these, hand-stitched thread and knotted silk accumulate at the work's points of greatest tension: the woman's wild, cascading hair; the torso's hollow centre; the rose form that sits at the heart of the image, densely wound and heavily stitched, like an emblem of everything the work contains. Two male figures flank the composition, their bodies solidly rendered but their faces left unresolved — authority without particularity. At the centre, a woman's face alone is fully realised, her features drawn with careful attention amid the surrounding turbulence.

The quality of sustained, laborious making is not incidental, it is a key element. Each stitch mirrors the sustained courage of those who returned to the streets of Minsk day after day in the summer and autumn of 2020, knowing what waited for them. The title draws from Kupalinka, an old Belarusian folk song — a mother's lament, sung into the dark — that was adopted as an anthem of the 2020 protest movement. In the Women in White Marches that followed the disputed presidential election, thousands of women dressed in white, carrying flowers, formed human chains across the city, placing their bodies between the crowd and the state. Dark Night Where is Your Daughter distils that moment: the contrast between the stillness and resolve of the central female figure and the surrounding force that presses against her. The question posed by the title is not merely rhetorical. It is a mother's question, a city's question — one that still goes unanswered for many Belarusian families.