Babushka, Svetlana and me: a photo essay

Russian-born photographer Maria Quigley grew up in Britain. For this project she returned to her grandmother's small flat in St Petersburg to explore themes of memory, isolation and female identity across three generations of her family

The images in this series address questions of claustrophobic spaces. They convey a sense of being locked down, however they were taken last year before the emergence of Covid-19. They were snapped inside my grandmother's small flat in St Petersburg, which for many years she has hardly left. As long as I can remember my grandmother's world has conveyed a sense of being locked down. She leaves the flat once a week to get groceries and a TV guide from the shop directly below her apartment. In the winter she doesn't leave the flat for three months because it's too cold and windy outside, or too slippery.