Naomi – A Life Line
Installation with soil, archival photographs and text, 2025
Naomi – A Life Line is an installation tracing the life of Naomi Warren (1920–2016), a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor, businesswoman and philanthropist, through the places that shaped her life.
About the Work
Born in Wołkowysk, then part of Poland and now Belarus, Warren studied in Białystok and was staying in Warsaw at the outbreak of the Second World War. She was deported to Auschwitz and subsequently imprisoned in Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. Following liberation, she spent a brief period in Paris before emigrating to New York and eventually settling in Houston, Texas.
The installation maps this journey through soil collected from locations connected to Warren’s life. The soil was gathered through a network of family members, friends, colleagues and institutions across Europe and the United States. Each is presented alongside archival imagery and a folded paper note relating to that particular place and moment in Warren’s story.
Visitors are invited to touch the soil and unfold the accompanying notes. This physical encounter shifts the work away from a purely chronological account towards a tactile geography of an individual life. Soil becomes both material and witness: connecting places separated by borders, political change and time, while carrying associations of home, displacement, persecution and survival.
The process of gathering the earth also extends the work beyond the exhibition space. Passed from one person to another and across national borders, the samples form a collectively assembled map of Warren’s life, connecting contemporary acts of remembrance with the places through which she travelled.
Details
Installation with soil, archival photographs and text
Soil samples from locations connected to Naomi Warren’s life
Wooden containers, 8 × 8 cm, archival imagery and folded paper notes
Acknowledgements
Soil for the installation was collected and contributed by Krzysztof Meller, Nicholas Liu, Mirja Maria Thiel, Grzegorz Jarmucewicz, anonymous, Dr Myfanwy Lloyd, Nathalie Audrin, Hannah Sprute (Ravensbrück Memorial Museum), and Bernd Horstmann (Bergen Belsen Memorial).
The artist would like to thank everyone who helped collect soil for this work.
Exhibitions
Life Lines, Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum, Woodstock, UK, 2025
In-Between, Wozownia Art Gallery, Toruń, Poland, October 2025, as part of Vintage Photo Festival
This work is part of Life Lines, developed in collaboration with the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum, Woodstock
Project PDF
Support
Developed with support from Arts Council England through a Developing Your Creative Practice grant.
Other Works in Life Lines
Photography Credits
Installation photography: Mateusz Jagielski / Wozownia Art Gallery, Poland, 2025
Additional installation and detail photography: Ania Ready
