Pink doesn't exist

It all started seventeen years ago. A sudden fear. A fear that even an adult couldn’t cope with, not to mention a 7-year old child. I remember her big brown eyes looking at me in search of some help. And the words that I will never forget: ‘Mum, help me please’. I felt so helpless...

The cycle ‘Pink doesn’t exist’ is a story about a fight with depression. These works consist of overlaid photos which I have been taking of my daughter for many years and fragments of Wiktoria’s self-portraits which she painted whilst fighting with the illness. Her paintings from those days are horribly sad. A black and white deformed body, a face with dead eyes. The self-portraits started changing as the therapy progressed. Apparently, the colour pink doesn’t exist. It is only an interpretation from our brain. But it was that colour, just like hope, which very slowly started filling the canvas and the cold grey gradually started becoming warmer.

Although I spent many hours talking to Wiktoria, I still don’t fully understand how it is to have depression. But I do fully understand how it is to be the mother of a child who is fighting that illness.