I often work with imagery related to my ancestors. I recently had a letter translated which was sent to my Grandmother by her Aunt. Both women were Armenians who survived the Armenian Genocide [1915 in Turkey]. The letter was written around 1950. My Grandmother had immigrated to the USA in 1930. Her Aunt continued to live in Aleppo, Syria where refugee camps were set up after World War I. Her Aunt calls her “My Dear Orek” and “Orok”. The translator asked me, “Was that her nickname?”. I had never heard that before. I googled “Orek”. In Turkish myth, it means a reanimated corpse controlled by a witch. “Orok” is possibly a derivative of the Armenian ‘horak’uyr’ which means paternal aunt; so possibly ‘little aunty’. The chasm between these two meanings has obsessed me. My Grandmother was thought to have been killed during the Genocide, so in a sense, she was brought back to life. Her Aunt rescued her from a situation akin to slavery in 1924 and brought her to Aleppo. The paintings and the book are a meditation on these meanings.