Aurora.

When we left Iran in 2006, it was just my mother, my sister, and me. We arrived in England in January, in the heart of winter. The days were short, the nights stretched long, and the weather felt endlessly grey and unfamiliar. We said goodbye to everything we knew and stepped into a place of beauty and possibility, yet for a time it felt just out of reach. We could see the world around us, but we could not yet fully step into it. That sense of standing between wonder and uncertainty has stayed with me ever since.

This work draws on that period of my life. A parent shelters two young chicks against an unforgiving landscape, holding warmth and safety at the centre of something vast and unknown. In many ways, it is a portrait of my mother. She carried the weight of change quietly, without letting it fall fully on us, allowing us instead the space to grow into a world that was still unfamiliar.

The aurora holds the emotional core of the piece. Its shifting colour transforms the frozen landscape, turning isolation into possibility. The contrast between the coldness of the environment and the warmth of protection beneath it reflects how I remember those years: challenging, extraordinary, and marked by a quiet resilience.

More than anything, this work is about the people who become our shelter while we find our place in the world.