Immigrants
Amy, Year 12
My parents are immigrants from Albania who lived through the rise and fall of the communist Soviet Union. My sculpture is a representation of my parents' hardships, escaping war and migrating to an unfamiliar Western country. I wanted to capture their excitement and anxiety of leaving everything they had known to find a safe home. The feet were made by filling the negative space of the shoe with expanding foam. Each ragged shoe has a unique imprint inside, the red string represents the blood of my parents drawn back to their homeland, and the cage is representative of the mental barrier created by the government preventing my parents from leaving Albania.