Resistance: a Five Year Retrospective #2

To mark our anniversary, we will be publishing a retrospective from our extensive archives over the course of five consecutive weeks. Five years of doubts and questions, caught up in the daily grind of events and distress. We are not mere spectators — No, The Crown Letter is a choir in motion, a circle, women remembering, fighting, and perhaps some of a consolation.

Valeria Troubina

From the Depths

Oil on canvas, 175 cm х 150 cm, 2015

This is a reflection on my own situation … and my observation of everything that is happening from the outside. In 2014, in Ukraine, I felt like I wasn’t involved, that I was safe, but that I was somehow deep underwater and couldn’t breathe, and that life, like a boat, floated by on the surface. Here it looks like a bullet or a coffin… and it seems like you could swim up into the light; it is like a vision in a dream!

First published on May 2022

Taia Galagan-Gershuni

Kiev Morning

Kiev Morning, March 2022

First published in April 2022

Emma Woffenden

Weaponised.

Sketched idea for a sculpture.

First published in February 2022

Dettie Flynn

To flee in search of security


Video,2'24, Champtoceaux 49 & Nantes 44, France

to flee in search of security or to stay to fight

fuir en quête de sécurité ou rester pour se battre

PEACE in UKRAINE

МИР НА УКРАÏНИ

First published in March 2022

Kyoko Kasuya

Still burning there, May 2022

First published in May 2022

Neringa Naujokaite

Yellow.

Photography, 2010

First published in March 2022

Cornelia Eichhorn

Humaps N°17

Papercut done with leftovers from other series, 25x35cm,
2023 all rights reserved

First published in July 2023

Natacha Nisic

“Je n’ai plus peur de rien”

Photographie couleur, 2024

Photographie réalisée avec une carte de la Manche de la navigatrice Dee Caffari.

Photograph composed with a map of the English Channel by sailor Dee Caffari.

First published in December 2024

Ruth Maclennan

Horizon (Second Lap)

Video, 3’11”, 2021

Horizon – the space between us

I would like to invite you to help create a collective film.

During the Coronavirus pandemic I have felt my horizons simultaneously shrink to the size of my neighbourhood, my home, and expand as my thoughts and dreams are filled with events and places far away.

Forest fires, floods, empty streets, streets full of protests, violence, or celebrations, long, socially-distanced lines at polling stations or banks, an iceberg floating in the Antarctic Ocean, and death, daily – all these scenes have been happening before our eyes. The rifts between people seem especially deep right now. Maybe others share a feeling of shrunken and overstretched horizons.

I would like to create a collective, continuous – potentially infinite – landscape film, inspired by the ‘endless landscape’ card game. I want to see what happens when we follow a horizon line. The horizon needn’t be a distant view of hills or sea, or buildings, or sky – your landscape can be your kitchen shelf, the kerb, a leaf or rock. Your interior or internal landscape is perhaps the nearest to hand, the most vivid, the horizon that holds your attention right now.

First published in November 2021

Liza Dimbleby

War (Shelter Series), November 2021

Postcard from Glasgow: Shelters

I started making these small drawings of shelters, and trees, last November, as the trees shed their yellow. They were about inhabitable spaces, in the mind’s eye, and in the drawing. I made them on torn up strips of old life drawings from twenty years ago, that I did not want to throw away, regretting the waste of good quality paper. The images kept on coming, as if wanting to be painted. When I taped them to the wall in the spring, they seemed somehow to fit the awful circumstances in which they were now situated. Not a direct depiction, but not unrelated to the bleakness. And at the same time they were about a sort of refuge, a waiting or suspension. It’s November again. And the war is relentless, still. And I am still painting shelters.

First published in November 2022