The Refugee Project

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I began seeing images of what I call “fallout” from wars in the media over and over. I feel strongly about what war does to people and more closely, to what it perpetuates in our society, for years and years to come.

I started to donate my work to help the refugee crisis in 2016, and then, decided these images I kept seeing were becoming like most things in our fast moving technological world, a blur. We become numb to what is really being shown or what is happening, or maybe we don’t want to look at all.

Like my walks in nature, when I see the smallest wildflower, some are rarely seen or looked at. I thought of these refugee children, and what their world was like, and what they were carrying with them into their life growing up. Some never made it. This is about those that do.

I feel a deep compulsion to shine a light on these children, their families; their plight, and trauma, and of the refugee crisis and the ongoing social dilemma we are in. I began abstracting from the images of refugees I kept seeing over and over. The result is the work I call “The Refugee Project”.

"A War against the world is helplessly a war against the people of the world. Against everybody. The innocent. The children. Increasingly, as modern militarism builds and brawls over the face of the planet, people of ordinary decency are thinking of the children. What about the children?, we ask, as our leaders acknowledge the inevitability of 'some civilian casualties', or collateral casualties as they put it. But we are thinking not just of the children who are living beneath the bombs. We are thinking, too, of our own children to whom someone must explain that some people - including some of 'our' people - look at the deaths of children as an acceptable cost of victory." ~Wendell Berry