Sasha from Yerevan, Armenia came to us with the Yiddish word לופטל, Luftal, meaning dandelion, and alongside it the Hebrew word קשר, connection, was added.

She came from a large Ashkenazi family scattered across the world, with relatives living across Russia, Armenia, Latvia, Poland, Israel, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. She herself had lived between countries and, at seventeen, left home to study elsewhere, a movement that became part of how she understood her family story.

The image that came to her was a dandelion seed. When the flower withers, its seeds are carried by the wind, traveling far from the mother plant to grow somewhere new, never returning to where they came from yet always carrying that origin within them.

For Sasha, this became a metaphor for Jewish life in the diaspora, a people scattered by history who continue to carry memory, language, and belonging into new places, held together by an invisible thread of connection.

Her own process was also one of return. Her parents grew up in the Soviet Union, cut off from Jewish culture and religion, while her grandparents had learned to hide their origins, even changing documents to avoid persecution. Now Sasha was gathering those fragments back together through photographs, postcards, family records, Hebrew study, traditions, and pieces of a history once hidden.

Gabriel wanted to stay close to her first image. A single dandelion seed, light and almost transparent, formed from the Yiddish word itself, holding within it the added layer of קשר, something that ties, binds, and connects even across distance. The result is airy and subtle, carrying enough abstraction to preserve its private meaning.

For Sasha, this piece became a way to carry what had been scattered. A small seed of memory moving through the world, still connected to its source.