Studio Diary: The Weight She Carries

The Weight She Carries · September 2026

A photograph by Fadi A Thabet of a young girl carrying containers of water stayed with me.

There was something about her expression, the weight she was carrying, and the destruction surrounding her that I couldn't simply look at and move past. The containers were heavy enough, but I kept thinking about everything else a child in those circumstances might be carrying.

I began with her figure at the centre and gradually built the world around her using layers of paint, collage, texture, fragments of words and marks.

Fadi's photograph became my primary visual reference, not only for the girl, but also for elements of the damaged structures surrounding her. I wasn't trying to reproduce the photograph. I wanted to respond to what had remained with me after seeing it and allow those elements to become part of my own mixed-media language.

Another photograph, by Ibrahim Isam, had also stayed in my mind. From it came the inspiration for the large question-mark-like form emerging quietly through the background.

The blue-greys developed from something I kept noticing in images and videos of destruction, landscapes almost drained of colour, covered in concrete dust, rubble and the remains of buildings. I wanted that grey atmosphere to surround her, while fragments of what once existed continued to show through the layers.

As the painting developed, I kept returning to the girl. Her face changed many times. So did the structures around her. Some elements became clearer while others disappeared again beneath paint.

Her blue shirt eventually became important. Against the greys, ochres and fractured marks surrounding her, it allowed her to remain present within the destruction without separating her completely from it.

The water containers also remained deliberately unresolved. I wanted them recognisable enough to feel their physical weight, but still part of the fragmented world around her. Her bare feet became another quiet detail I couldn't ignore. She is not only carrying the weight of the water, but walking barefoot through a landscape of rubble and destruction. That small detail seemed to say more than I could add with paint.

Only when the painting was nearly finished did I begin to understand what I had been painting.

The water is the weight we can see.

There is another weight we cannot.

And above her, the question remains.

The Weight She Carries may also be the beginning of something I hadn't planned, a continuing body of work about children whose childhood has been interrupted by circumstances they did not create.

I am deeply grateful to Fadi A Thabet and Ibrahim Isam for generously giving me permission to interpret elements of their photographs through my own mixed-media practice.

Primary reference photograph © Fadi A Thabet — used with permission.
Additional reference photograph © Ibrahim Isam — used with permission.