Three generations of Women portrayed in the echoes of War in Bosnia.

Exploring War in a quiet way, my work emphasizes the long term impacts and the lingering effects on survivors. This body of work will explore the echoing effects of War on three generations of women of Croatian heritage from the Vares area near Sarajevo. The series will comprise of portraits of the family as well as paintings of their domestic spaces and natural environments.

Born and raised in Sarajevo, Daughter moved with her family to Vares to escape the siege. Her intuition told her early on that something was terribly wrong. She still struggles with the fact that neighbor turned against neighbor and her best friends from childhood suddenly were supposed to be her enemies. Not buying into the propaganda being fed to her by various sources, she escaped with her older sister three months before the rest of the family was forced to leave. They gained asylum in Sweden, and then she was granted refugee status in the United States. Knowing intimately the effects of war, she has been working with people who are escaping conflict all over the world and seeking asylum in the US.

In 1993, extremists from Croatia led a horrible massacre against the Muslims of Stupri Do that Anthony Loyd describes as “humanity banished to a barren wilderness of darkness and howling” The killings resulted in a huge retaliation directed towards Vares, which at that point was the largest integrated community in Central Bosnia. Overnight it turned into a ghost town as 20,000 Croatians departed in a huge exodus.

A few months after Daughters’ departure, Mother escaped with her youngest daughter and her sister’s family in this exodus; they all ended up in Zagreb, Croatia. She continues medical work she had been practicing in Vares during the war. Her sanctuary is a small porch where she has cultivated three generations of cacti.

Today, Vares is dominated by an abandoned iron mill where Father had worked as a mining engineer prior to his death. The structure was shelled and looted and now stands as a monument to the destructive nature of war.

Grandfather and Grandmother chose not to leave their ranch above Vares as it has been in the family for hundreds of years. They were able to survive by opening their doors to anyone who needed shelter, food or a strategic vantage point. No questions asked. Their barns were emptied by looters, but the structures are still standing. Their land remains in the family, perched up on the picturesque mountainous landscape of ancient forests and rolling fields full of grasses and wildflowers.

Grandmother is very old now, her unkempt garden drastically reduced in size, but still nourishing. Surviving three wars has let her appreciate peace even as she is filled with sorrow that displacement has scattered her family. Although she lost her parents and some siblings to the two World Wars, the hardest loss for her was to loose her son in the Bosnian war just ten days before the Dayton peace agreement. He stepped on a landmine while trying to save a wounded comrade.

All of the places described above as well as portraits that reflect the range of emotions in the three generations of women will be manifested in a large series of intimate sized paintings of different proportions. They will reflect displacement, sorrow and destruction as well as determination and strength.