I didn’t start this project with a clear idea. It began more with a kind of internal tension — a sense that there was something I needed to find. I ended up in a vintage bookstore, scanning the shelves — not so much for information, but for a word that could serve as an anchor.

 

I looked at the spines, at the titles. Most of it felt foreign, lifeless. And then — on the very bottom shelf — two large volumes of Churchill. His reflections on World War II. They were the only books in the store devoted to war. I can’t say I was looking for him specifically. But in that moment, they resonated. Not as ideology, but as testimony.

 

I embroidered his face onto the cover of the sketchbook. Not out of reverence. Maybe to bring him closer. Or maybe to keep him at a distance. His image doesn’t evoke a single, clear feeling in me.

 

Inside is a portrait of Oppenheimer. I hesitated for a long time about including him. His story has become almost mythic — the scientist who realized too late. But I don’t see him as a symbol. I see him as a person caught between knowledge and consequence. What interests me isn’t him, exactly — it’s the quiet inside him, the kind you might never return to after doing something irreversible.

 

The sketchbook folds like a ribbon. It’s not a chronology, not a narrative. It’s a landscape where time and faces blend together. I paint watercolor portraits — they’re fragile, blurred. There are no heroes in them. Just people who don’t always have a choice.

 

The only text in the book is a fragment from Churchill’s final chapter, where he describes the nuclear threat. There’s nothing loud in it. Just a simple statement: a new reality has already arrived. Sometimes I return to that fragment to remember how easily history shifts in scale and tone.

 

I’m not speaking on behalf of anyone. I’m not drawing conclusions. I don’t know what’s right. I’m just unfolding the paper further. And each time I wonder — how far have we gone, and whose face will appear next?