Introduction
I welcome you to Lineage of the Future: One Family, One Century, six monumental portraits inspired by my grandmother, mother, father, myself, my wife, and my daughter. They trace a family’s passage from the destruction of Smyrna in 1922 towards 2027 and beyond, carrying experiences of displacement, war, rebuilding, and migration. They also carry a quieter history: what one generation gives the next—its values, fears, ways of loving, and hopes.
These are six people across four generations, each with a name and a history that may resonate with others. My grandmother is The Root; my mother, The Haven; my father, The Captain; my self-portrait, The Crucible; my wife, The Companion; and my daughter, The Light. The names express roles I have come to see in our family story, without claiming to contain the whole of any person.
The focus here is close: a century of lived experience and the emotional inheritance connecting survivors of catastrophe with descendants born long afterward.
I began these sculptures wanting to understand the people who raised me. Only later did I recognise their connection to my own healing and my responsibility for what would follow. The question changed from “What has shaped us?” to “What will we pass on?”
Grandmother: The Root
My maternal grandmother, Maria Papaioannou, née Blizioti, was born around 1903. In 1922, she fled burning Smyrna, losing a prosperous home in a cosmopolitan city. In Greece, her compatriots were not always welcoming. She married and had seven children, five of whom survived into adulthood. Later, she lived with different children, including with my parents and me in the New York area.
She said little about what she had endured, but her silence was not empty. As a sensitive child, I sensed loss beneath her composure before I understood its history. In The Root, I sought the emotions of the young woman escaping her burning home and arriving in Piraeus: shock, grief, and the effort to remain composed when the familiar world has disappeared. Her dignity belongs to her as a person, before any account of what she lost or achieved.
The Root holds a paradox: uprooted herself, she became a source of continuity. What she preserved could no longer depend on a house or a city. It travelled through the family she raised, her habits, and her determination. Her experience reminds me that behind the collective language of refugees are people with particular attachments, abilities, and aspirations. Their lives extend beyond displacement.
I felt this when an enlargement and adaptation of her portrait became Refugee—Woman of Smyrna, unveiled in Athens in 2022 for the centenary of Smyrna’s destruction. In a neighbourhood shaped by refugee history, people recognised their own grandmothers in her face. My family’s portrait had become a place where others could encounter theirs.
Mother: The Haven
My mother, Panayota Petrides, née Papaioannou, was born in 1930. She carried the consequences of her mother’s displacement while growing up through Nazi occupation and civil war, amid food scarcity and violence. The photograph that inspired her portrait shows her around 1950: serious, thoughtful, perhaps guarded. I wanted to retain the presence of that young woman, whose adult life was opening after years of insecurity.
I call her The Haven for her place in my understanding of home. A haven is something people create and sustain, sometimes while carrying fears of their own. A parent’s effort to give a child security can coexist with deep awareness of how suddenly it can disappear. I absorbed these lessons through habits, worries, and unspoken rules.
Together, The Root and The Haven reveal leadership that can remain invisible in public history. My grandmother and mother sustained family life in circumstances they could scarcely control, using judgment, endurance, and resourcefulness. Giving them monumental presence asks whose lives deserve public recognition. Women’s contributions to survival and rebuilding are part of history itself. Honouring them means recognising their agency, inner lives, and the possibilities circumstances allowed or denied them. Their strength should not make their sacrifices seem inevitable.
Father: The Captain
My father, Captain Christos Petrides, lived from 1929 to 2017. Like my mother, he came of age amid occupation and civil war. As a sea captain, he embodied leadership, clear vision, and decision-making; at home, he emphasised vigilance and safety. The Captain carries this character in its heavy brow and concentrated gaze. I see determination and, at times, austerity. He anticipated danger, took responsibility for those who depended on him, and expected much of us.
As a child, I felt those expectations directly. As an adult, I have tried to understand their origins. Someone who has known scarcity may struggle to trust that safety will last. The discipline that enables rebuilding can persist after danger has passed. My father helped guide us towards security while transmitting some of the watchfulness that made it possible. Understanding him has meant recognising the closeness of protection and fear.
Self-portrait: The Crucible
Born in 1964, I had possibilities unavailable to my grandmother and parents. Yet their experiences shaped our household. I inherited resilience, ambition, and commitment to family, alongside anxieties I did not initially understand. The Crucible marks the point where that inheritance becomes a subject of conscious examination.
My struggle was both outward and inward: building a life across two countries and, eventually, two careers, while trying to understand difficulties within myself. Sculpture gave those difficulties a form I could look at. I did not begin with a theory of generational trauma to illustrate. Recognition came after the sculptures were made and travelling. Seeing the faces together clarified the emotional world from which I had emerged; making and presenting them became part of my healing.
The self-portrait draws on the intensity of a head from Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais. That encounter with French sculpture helped me find a language for anguish, dignity, and inward struggle. More broadly, my work develops through dialogue with ancient Greek sculpture and artists who transformed its inheritance, including Michelangelo, Donatello, and Rodin. Their example invites me to explore the pressures of a particular life through the human head.
The Crucible names a demanding, unfinished process. I have had opportunities to reflect and seek understanding that were less available to my parents and grandmother, who had to concentrate on survival. Making use of those opportunities is one way I can honour what they accomplished. Here, culture and well-being meet in my experience: art helps me approach feelings difficult to articulate and recognise pain without making it a person’s entire story. I try to preserve what sustained us while loosening the hold of what still hurts.
Wife: The Companion
My wife is The Companion. She supported me through a difficult, transitional period of my life, when one chapter was closing and the next had not yet taken shape. The portrait shows her draped and still, with a steady gaze that holds both waiting and resolve. Where the other portraits look back through the generations, The Companion belongs to the present: she is the partner with whom a family is built, and she helps carry what we inherited forward to the next generation.
Daughter: The Light
My daughter, Sofia Petrides, was born in 2009 and was twelve when she posed for The Light. Inspired by an ancient Greek kore, her portrait looks upward. I see innocence, intelligence, optimism, and a hint of a smirk: someone beginning to meet the world on her own terms. Her expression changes the group’s emotional atmosphere. She has a family history, but her life remains open.
We have worked to give her a safer foundation, emotionally and physically. She knows our story’s broad outline but is not asked to resolve everyone else’s suffering. I hope she draws strength from her ancestors while remaining free to become someone we could not have predicted.
This is my most personal way of imagining a future beyond the repetition of the past. The Light’s future depends partly on decisions made before her generation can make them. What do we teach children to fear or encourage them to attempt? What conditions do we create for their lives? Becoming good ancestors begins here. I want our legacy to include peace, curiosity, and care for others without constant expectation of catastrophe.
Materials and the future
The material life of the sculptures belongs to this concern for what we leave behind. Each work begins with traditional clay modelling, through the direct encounter of hands, tools, and material. It then passes through 3D scanning and digital work before being enlarged in recycled PETG. I return to the physical sculpture to rework it by hand and apply metals and patinas.
This movement between clay, digital form, and recycled material joins a long sculptural tradition to contemporary methods. Choosing recovered material also gives practical expression to an interest in renewal: something discarded enters a new life as an object made to be encountered, cared for, and preserved.
At monumental scale, these portraits enter a shared space. Before a visitor knows a name or date, there is a face to meet. Documentary films offer historical context and a closer view of the people and the making; the sculptures leave room for a response that may precede words.
Across these lives, social transformation becomes personal: a refugee establishes a home, parents seek security after war, a son moves between Greece and the diaspora, and a daughter approaches an unfolding future. Identity changes, while continuity travels through relationships and values as much as places.
I hope that spending time with these faces will lead you towards histories in your own family: the ones often told, the ones barely mentioned, and the ones you have only begun to understand. You may recognise a grandmother’s reserve, a parent’s vigilance, your own effort to make sense of an inheritance, or a child’s confidence in what lies ahead.
Lineage of the Future begins with what happened to those before us. It asks what we will make possible for those who come after.