Ancillary Figures
Ancillary Figures is an ongoing series of portraits dedicated to women who participated in underground resistance movements across Europe during the Second World War, and it’s after effects. Many of these women served as couriers, saboteurs, organizers, partisans and rescuers. Roles that were often overlooked, minimized, or erased in official historical narratives. Some were arrested, tried and executed; others survived but remained marginal to the historical record: A life of self-erasure was a means to stay alive, and to remain invisible was one way to insure safety. The project seeks to return attention to these lives by reconstructing their presence through painting.
Working from archival photographs, documents, and fragmentary sources, I approach each portrait as both an act of remembrance and an act of inquiry. The images I encounter are often incomplete: damaged prints, blurred reproductions, or photographs stripped of context. Rather than restoring them to a seamless historical image, the paintings retain traces of this instability – marks, erasures, and interruptions that register the fragile transmission of memory through time.
The title Ancillary Figures refers to the ways these women have often been treated in historical narratives: as supporting characters in stories centered on male actors or national mythologies. By isolating and enlarging their images through painting, the series reverses that hierarchy. Figures once relegated to the margins become the central subject.
Painting offers a medium uniquely suited to this task. Its slow, material process allows the image to move between documentation and interpretation, between archive and memorial. Each portrait becomes a site of witnessing: an attempt to hold open the space between past and present, between disappearance and recognition. In this way, Ancillary Figures functions both as a counter-archive and as a counter-monument: a body of work dedicated to lives that resisted oppression and whose histories continue to demand visibility.