Loribelle Spirovski

And my dad is a huge perfume fiend.

But it was such an intimate thing where I would get to know the traces of him.

Yes.

What about language?

I mean, were you speaking English with one another?

Yes.

So he, with the English that he had, we were able to communicate and I had to get used to his accent, of course, which was completely different.

And so I would learn to read his body language very well.

And then when my brother was born, he decided to not speak English anymore and to only speak Serbian or majority Serbian so that my brother would learn it.

What did that mean for you?

Well, it isolated me from him further.

I felt even more that he was impenetrable.

And my mum, my mum is phenomenally skilled with languages.

Unfortunately, it skipped me, but she could speak Serbian.

So they would speak in Serbian and they would speak Serbian to my brother and eventually my grandma, my dad's mum would come.

They would all be speaking Serbian and I would just be...

alone.

Again, felt really, really alone, sort of searching for some kind of umbilical cord to get back to the family.

That is definitely one thing that my dad and I shared.

So because his brother was also an artist, he was familiar with the idea of an artist.