As with many of my works, the reference image began with something I found online. I often save photographs that catch my attention — interesting archetypes, expressive faces, or images with strong cascading light and enough detail to hold my interest throughout the painting process.

This piece was created during a period when the conflict in Syria was dominating the news, and my feeds were filled with deeply distressing images.

At the time, I was building a substrate from cassette tapes and searching for the right face to paint onto it. As I worked, I began thinking about what those tapes represented to my own generation — making mixtapes for friends, recording songs from the radio, writing on the labels, and doodling across them to make each one personal.

They were simple rituals of growing up, but they also represented friendship, music, freedom and a sense of normality that was easy to take for granted.

When I came across the photograph of this young Syrian girl, I was struck by the contrast. So much of the ordinary childhood experience that I associated with these objects had been disrupted or taken away from children of her generation by circumstances entirely beyond their control.

Placing her portrait onto the cassette-tape substrate therefore felt instinctively right. The material stopped being purely nostalgic and became part of the meaning of the work — a contrast between the familiarity and freedom of one childhood and the uncertainty and disruption of another.