March 2022 in Kyiv, when the city was empty except for soldiers and volunteers and the tall gothic buildings stood like frozen giants with empty-eyed windows staring mindlessly, I was invited unexpectedly to a gig with an all-female group called Folkulaka, who turn traditional Ukrainian folk songs into dark fairy-tales of werewolves and headless women […]

Watching Putin on TV, May Day, May 9th, from our bomb shelter bedroom in Odessa, interested me not because of the moment when he was up on his podium, but the “theatrical performance,” his “ploy,” appearing as “one of the people” when he marched the streets disguised, truly I felt, like a wolf in sheep’s […]

It has been a long time since I have experienced something as damaging as the Kibeho massacre in Rwanda but the Bridge of Death at Irpin comes close. Like with the work I did about Rwanda, I knew I had to create at least one major work about the bridge. The cars were removed and […]

Around ten thirty tonight a huge explosion rocked our building. We are in a three-hundred-year-old building residence – not a hotel but part of the old city with a courtyard and carriageway. Hellen chose it from the internet because it looked bohemian. Our neighbour is also named George, and is a soft spoken and very […]

A fat, stuffed bear sits above a pile of rubble on the only remaining floor of a destroyed building, between two gutted apartment towers. This soft bear wears a smirk. A slit has been cut between its legs and a piece of masonry placed to cover it.  At the bears foot there is the rotting […]

Today in Bucha, they have cleared most of the civilian dead from the streets and basement cellars holding winter preserves – slaughtered, tortured, and raped by the Russian soldiers, who here in Ukraine they are laughing sadistic “demon gods,” destroying homes and killing civilians “for fun” . . . I wonder what it takes to […]

With the sound of bombs and missiles in the distance, we just did an interview with ABC Illawarra. We could hear in the voice of Melinda, the journalist, that she was clearly moved. I told the story of “The Kiss.” People are writing back saying “The Kiss” turns our stand into a romance – a […]

Our apartment is within a couple of hundred meters of Maidan Square where the Orange Revolution occurred in 2004 and the bloody Euromaidan protests of 2014. Possibly not a smart place to be as it is the symbolic centre of opposition to Russian rule, its alternative name being Independence Square. Up until now, the most […]