In 2018 news started to trickle out that children were being separated at the border from their parents. The initial story we heard was that the government had simply lost 1300 children. In protest to this news I decided to draw these children until they had all been found them. Attaching a 7ft by 5ft piece of paper to the wall of my studio I got up every morning at 4am to draw 30 of them. Gradually over the next few weeks the full extent of what was going on at the border began making headlines. Over 2000 children were separated from their parents many of them not knowing where they were. The painting reflects this sudden change of numbers with the spacing of the children becoming tighter as many more were now going to be needed to be represented on here. While the majority of those 2000 plus children were eventually reunited with their parents, thanks to international uproar, news started to come out of thousands more children sitting in camps without parents. So while I “finished” this painting, over one year later, the day my daughter started kindergarten, when the paper was filled with over 5000 children squashed onto it, the problem is still sadly far from over. Along side the painting I also included stories of motherhood or news from the border, that I posted on instagram @2000taken, in an effort to keep the families involved sounding like humans not just statistics and policy. This grew into some what of a community as people shared their stories about the love they had with their children along with my stories. I wanted these stories to hight light the incredible bonds most parents have with their children and to help everyone therefore understand, to be able to empathize with, quite how painful and dangerous these separations must be for the families at the border. This was made all the more clearer to me when one day my daughter Dotti, who was 5 at the time, was looking at the painting and pointed out one little girl, “ mamma!” she said, “ She looks just like me!” We are all human, the love I have for my daughters is no stronger or more special than the love these families have for each other at the border. With one flick of fate this could have been me, it could have been you.