Arriving in London from Eastern Europe at just 15 in 2020, Sonia encountered empty streets, a tiny room, limited English and a city that felt like a closed door. Sharing one cramped bedroom with her mother in a house of five strangers, she turned to painting as a way to process feelings of isolation and displacement. Through the charity City Lions, that deeply personal work was later displayed at the Saatchi Gallery, transforming a private struggle into a powerful moment of public recognition.
For more stories about self-expression, confidence and belonging, explore Sue’s journey into community through song, or discover how Sola uses representation to help young people see new possibilities. Browse the full Voices from the Piazza collection.
When I moved to London in 2020, the city didn’t feel like a city at all. It felt like a closed door.
I got here in search for freedom, self-expression and limitless creativity, but quickly fear and doubt took over me.
Lockdown had emptied the streets, English slipped through my fingers, and I didn’t know a single person my age, and couldn’t meet any at school or anywhere else – everything was closed. I was just 15, lived with my mum in one small room inside a house shared with six strangers. There wasn’t much space to speak, or think, or feel – everything pressed into everything else.
The sofa bed was unfolded in the middle of the room, its surface soft and uneven beneath my canvas and paints. It was where we slept, ate, watched films. Where I attended my teams’ lessons, where I spent most my time just after arrival.
And yet, inside that tightness, something started forming. Something quiet, and loud at the same time…
It’s February. Knees tucked under me, I’m attempting to hide away from cold air under blankets while trying not to stain them, leaning so close to the heater whenever I noticed it finally turning on. My mum left for work – She’s a musician, we’re all arty.
I start with sky blue – the colour that felt like breath in the middle of winter. Smooth, cold, almost clinical. Black background, empty. Around that time I fell in love with the colour orange. I dotted it around the painting where most vulnerable parts of the creature I was creating were. Shoulders, cheeks, eyes, mouth. Then, red, painful splashes of watered down acrylic. The long open mouth, the raised cheekbone flushed in orange, the sharp teeth, the bruised shadows under the sky-blue skin. It was emotion turned into anatomy.
I stood back from my painting at what I had created: It wasn’t a person, not anyone I knew. Rather something between a feeling and a body. An image born from long academic side profile practice turned “God no more academia PLEASE”
Looking at it felt strange, unsettling in the best way. It was like seeing the inside of my head for the first time. This creature held a tension I couldn’t name – sky-blue skin stretched over anxiety, orange warmth fighting with red static, a scream caught mid-breath. I felt exposed but also understood.
If someone asked me then what it meant, I wouldn’t have known how to explain it in words, but the creature explained itself just by existing.
I sent that painting, that creature, to the Westminster City Lions open call when I was sixteen. The most honest thing I had made came from a tiny room, on an opened sofa bed, at a time when I wasn’t sure I had anything to offer.
Then, emails start coming in. First step was being accepted. There was a long way to go, through online exhibition, Westminster City Hall and libraries and then a tiny chance of getting into Saatchi Gallery. I didn’t expect them to choose it.
And suddenly the city that once felt impenetrable began to shift. Slowly. Softly.
Like the moment a closed door moves a few millimetres and light enters for the first time.
I’m sat down on a white, slightly flimsy and put very high up office chair in our college computer classroom, spinning around and checking through emails, when suddenly one of them catches my eye.
It wasn’t very long. It contained a warning that my artwork will stay with them for a bit, because… The public voted for my work! People who didn’t know me, didn’t know my story, connected to a creature born from fear and noise and survival.
I felt recognised in a way I hadn’t expected. Not for who I was supposed to be, but for the strange little creature I made on an opened sofa bed. And inside that recognition, there was a quiet spark of confidence. A small voice saying, maybe you really do belong here.
At seventeen, the painting hung on the walls of the Saatchi Gallery.
It was the first time I ever put the colours of my paintings on myself. To match, to stand proudly near them. After that every single show I did the same thing.
When I look back, I feel a kind of loyalty to that younger version of me. She didn’t have stability or confidence, but she had this creature she believed in. And honestly, that belief carried and keeps carrying me further than anything else.