“The Light on the Other Side of the Tunnel” comes from a moment that stayed with me forever. When I was living and working in the refugee camp in Calais, I was running participatory photography workshops with refugees. Day after day I saw faces filled with exhaustion, fear, and a deep absence of hope.
One of the hardest things about that place was the contrast. Everything was horrible, yet you still tried to make things lighter — to create moments of dignity, laughter, or creativity. And sometimes it worked. But just when you felt you were helping, reality would crash back in and remind you how buried everyone really was.
One day, in the middle of a workshop, I could feel the energy in the room sinking. I tried to encourage them and said, “Remember, there is always light on the other side of the tunnel.” There was a pause. Then a young boy looked at me and said, “The problem is that the light is usually the Eurostar coming towards you.”
That sentence hit me like a punch. It stripped the metaphor of all comfort and exposed the truth beneath it. For them, the tunnel wasn’t symbolic. It was real. And the light at the end was often danger, injury, or death.
This painting carries that contradiction. The figure has reached the light, but it is not gentle. It’s intense, unsettling, almost violent. Hope exists here, but it is complicated and fragile. The darkness doesn’t disappear — it surrounds the light, framing it, reminding us of the cost of getting there.
This work is about survival without illusions. About the cruel honesty of hope when you live inside systems that offer no safe exits. It asks a difficult question: what does hope mean when even the light can kill you?
“The Light on the Other Side of the Tunnel” comes from a moment that stayed with me forever. When I was living and working in the refugee camp in Calais, I was running participatory photography workshops with refugees. Day after day I saw faces filled with exhaustion, fear, and a deep absence of hope.
One of the hardest things about that place was the contrast. Everything was horrible, yet you still tried to make things lighter — to create moments of dignity, laughter, or creativity. And sometimes it worked. But just when you felt you were helping, reality would crash back in and remind you how buried everyone really was.
One day, in the middle of a workshop, I could feel the energy in the room sinking. I tried to encourage them and said, “Remember, there is always light on the other side of the tunnel.” There was a pause. Then a young boy looked at me and said, “The problem is that the light is usually the Eurostar coming towards you.”
That sentence hit me like a punch. It stripped the metaphor of all comfort and exposed the truth beneath it. For them, the tunnel wasn’t symbolic. It was real. And the light at the end was often danger, injury, or death.
This painting carries that contradiction. The figure has reached the light, but it is not gentle. It’s intense, unsettling, almost violent. Hope exists here, but it is complicated and fragile. The darkness doesn’t disappear — it surrounds the light, framing it, reminding us of the cost of getting there.
This work is about survival without illusions. About the cruel honesty of hope when you live inside systems that offer no safe exits. It asks a difficult question: what does hope mean when even the light can kill you?
