Keeping Faith: A How To Guide

Keeping Faith in Creativity with Ada Jusic

• Women's Interfaith Network • Season 2 • Episode 1

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How can art help us tell important stories that all too often go unheard? What would it look like to truly value and prioritise creativity in our communities? And how do we keep faith in welcome for migrants and refugees, against the backdrop of hostile and divisive rhetoric?

In this episode, we spoke to multi-disciplinary artist Ada Jusic, the illustrator behind the graphic novel The Power of Welcome: bringing to life her own journey from Bosnia to the UK as a young child alongside the stories of her co-authors from Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine. We discuss the importance of age-appropriate conversations about migration with children and young people in a world of widespread misinformation, as well as how she brings her life-long passion for artistic self-expression into the community.

Keeping Faith: A How-To Guide was created as part of Women’s Interfaith Network's 2024-2025 Keeping Faith Programme. Read more about the programme here and be the first to hear about upcoming events and ways to get involved by signing up to our newsletter. Views expressed on this podcast are the speaker’s own and may not reflect the views of Women’s Interfaith Network.

Hosted by Maeve Carlin

Produced by Maeve Carlin and Adam Brichto

Edited by Adam Brichto

Executive Produced by Lady Gilda Levy

Theme music composed by Jamie Payne

Logo and Artwork designed by Jasey Finesilver

Support from Tara Corry

Maeve Carlin: 

Welcome to Keeping Faith, a how to guide, a new podcast from Women’s Interfaith Network exploring how women keep faith in ourselves, in each other, in a cause, or in religious faith so you can learn how to keep faith too.

I’m your host Maeve Carlin and today we’re back with a conversation with multi-disciplinary artist Ada Jusic –the illustrator behind the graphic novel The Power of Welcome, which tells her own story of arriving in the UK as a young child escaping the war in Bosnia, as well as bringing to life the journeys of her co-authors from Somalia, Syria, Afganistan and Ukraine. 

Ada shares how her artistic practice evolved from a personal lifeline in her own childhood to a career that helps shine a colourful light on stories and topics that have often been kept in shadow. She stresses the importance of access to the arts for young people, and the struggle to keep faith in welcome in a world that feels increasingly hostile to migrants and refugees. 

We have some exciting updates for the next phase of Women’s Interfaith Network’s Keeping Faith Programme coming later this year, so keep an eye on this podcast feed and on our social media. But for now, let’s jump into our conversation with Ada Jusic. 

Maeve Carlin: Well Ada, welcome to the podcast. 

Ada Jusic: Thank you, Maeve. Thank you for having me. 

Maeve Carlin: No, it's great to have you with us and I. You wrote this really beautiful piece for barbed wire fever, which is a project exploring what it means to see and provide refuge. We'll link it in our show notes that you called 'To be Heard is to be Loved', and I'd love to start by quoting it.

"There's a saying that being heard is so close to being loved, that for the average person being heard and being loved are indistinguishable. Every time I put pen to paper or created a comic, I was making myself heard, understood, and loved by myself as well as by others. And when I help others make their voices heard and understood, I see the spark of joy that comes with being heard, understood, and loved."

How does this ethos shape the work you do as an artist and the projects you take on? 

Ada Jusic: I suppose I'm technically a multidisciplinary artist. 

Maeve Carlin: Yes. 

Ada Jusic: I work as an illustrator. I make animations, I do, uh, mural painting. And, I also sometimes do like creative workshops and lecture at schools.

So I see myself as a visual storyteller and I gravitate to projects that tell a story, whether that's allegorical or kind of more journalistic, and whether it's my own or someone else's. And I believe to be the one who tells the story is a really powerful role. And it needs to be carried out with care and love and respect, especially when you're working with someone else's lived experiences, which I often am. 

When I'm working with people who want to tell their story, I believe it's important not to let your artistic vision or ego take over the show. It needs to be approached with the spirit of co-creation and with a delicate hand. As well as thinking - how do we make this engaging? how do we tell a good story? - I also need to ask myself, how do I make sure I'm telling their story authentically and that I'm involving them equitably in the process? Because, in a lot of my projects, I might be working with refugees or with children who are in the care system, or, for example, women who have experienced domestic violence.

So it's not just storytelling. You are working with people who are potentially quite traumatized by their experiences, or in the case of children, there's like safeguarding issues that you need to be wary of. So you really have to be, be mindful that there's a living person behind the material that you're working with.

So I'll often work very closely with the person whose story I'm telling through - that could be through interviews or discussions, workshops, getting, getting lots of feedback, exchanging ideas. And when they see the finished project come together and then they say, "this is exactly how I pictured it", or that it made them feel so happy or seen or emotional to see their experiences and ideas come to life, then that's where, when I know that I've done a good job and I've, I've made them feel seen and understood and loved in that process. 

Maeve Carlin: I'm so struck by, when I look at your work, that it's always the people whose stories aren't heard and understood, whose stories you seem to be telling. And I think, art is such a powerful tool for kind of shining a light on those stories, isn't it? 

Ada Jusic: Yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: This is also part of your own story, because as a young child, you used art to navigate things that might have been beyond the understanding or language of a 5-year-old girl: The war in your home country, Bosnia. Being displaced to the UK and separated from your father and grandparents. Can you share with us what that looked like for you and how it evolved from a personal lifeline into a career? 

Ada Jusic: So I, I've always loved drawing, which is, which is a bit of a cliche. Loads of artists say this, but I have always loved drawing.

Even before the war, I was often drawing for fun. My grandmother used to babysit me a lot and I'd get really frustrated, when I was doodling on a bit of paper wasn't going right. And I demand a new sheet of paper and she was like of that like first world war generation. So she, she'd be horrified that like, I'd want a completely fresh sheet to do, to start a new drawing on when I hadn't filled up the previous one. And we, you know, we get into a little bit of an argument about that. 

So I think I already had an artistic sensibility from a very young age, so it was really just a logical progression that art and drawing would eventually become an outlet for more difficult emotions. But you know, not just big overwhelming stuff and not just difficult emotions. As a teenager, I'd draw like what my ideal guy would look like, or I'd draw like outfits that I wished I owned or that would be allowed to wear. It was just always a really integral part of my self-expression.

I was also a bit of an awkward teenager. Um, so it was also a way of like impressing my peers. You know, people would ask me to draw them and their boyfriend and or to draw things for them. And it was how I, how I bonded with people.

And as I got older, I understood that it was actually possible to make a career out of this. And, of course, that was immediately what I wanted to do. There was never really any other, as far as I was concerned, never any other consideration for like a different career path. And fortunately my parents were, were really supportive, which I'm really grateful for. I think like perhaps many like first and second-generation immigrants of a similar background to me will understand this, when I say a lot of Bosnian parents would like, prefer their children went into medicine or law, economics, you know, like a really kind of solid. Something that's considered like quite a solid profession that you, you don't have to worry about being out of work. And you know I think their own parents wouldn't have encouraged them to pursue a career as an artist. So I feel, I feel very grateful to them that they've always supported me, even, even if they were sometimes a little bit sceptical of my choices. 

Maeve Carlin: Can you say a little bit more about how you first started drawing when you got here to the UK? Because I feel like that's part of your story that's so kind of powerful and amazing. 

Ada Jusic: Yes. So I talk, I talk about it in the article that you referenced. So when we first came to the UK, I came with just my mum and my brother and my father wasn't allowed to travel with us. He had been turned away by soldiers at the airport. So we had been separated from my father. We were living with my auntie and her husband. And they just had a baby. There was a recession going on. My uncle had lost his job. My mom had arrived with two small children, with nothing basically. So it was, uh, quite like a fraught time. 

And a family friend who was an artist became my child minder for a little while. And when she was looking after me and my brother, she would give me her old paints and her brushes and paper and just let me paint. And so I started to paint images that were really kind of processing everything that we'd been through.

So I would paint like a landscape that had two suns. One that was bright and colourful, and one that was black. And the black sun represented the war that we'd left behind. And, you know, I'd paint pictures of, um, being separated from my father. And when you actually look at them, they're just kind of like blobby coloured people. But to me, you know, they represented like being separated from my father or they represented soldiers. And I think that kind of really helped me process what we'd been through 'cause I was only four years old at the time. 

And you know, I didn't speak English. So I didn't really have a lot of people to talk to about what I was going through, and I'm not even sure I would've really had the language. Even in my own language, I'm not sure I really had the vocabulary to kind of explore what had just happened. So art really became that outlet for me.

Maeve Carlin: And also when you say the blurry splotchy person, I feel like isn't that how we experience so many difficult things, if we were to draw it down on paper? It's like this really difficult memory or difficult feeling I have is actually just a blurry splotchy person if I try and put it on paper. 

Ada Jusic: Yeah. It's visceral, isn't it?

Maeve Carlin: But that's, you know, it's so freeing when creating is about your own storytelling rather than it having to be perfect or right. 

Ada Jusic: Yes, absolutely. 

Maeve Carlin: And if people want to read more about your story, earlier this year you published a graphic novel called The Power of Welcome, where you and your co-authors share your stories and migration journeys all brought to life by your illustrations.

And the graphic novel not only shows us what war and displacement look like through the eyes of a child, but it's designed to be accessible to children and young people. Why was that important for you when developing the book? 

Ada Jusic: I was actually approached by Scholastic to work on this book, so I cannot take credit for the concept. They had the idea and approached myself and other authors to be involved. But I do think it's important for young people to be exposed to the realities of other people's lives. Um, so the, I think the, the intention of this book is that it’s going to be used as a teaching aide, particularly in schools to kind of stimulate discussion and to introduce, the concept of being a refugee or, um, you know, having, having to leave a country because of war, um, in a kind of age appropriate format for primary school age children. And I think that is really, really important. Children don't need to be totally cotton wool wrapped from the world. They are really capable of understanding and empathy in a way that I think we actually become closed off to as we get older. And I believe it's good to encourage that. For example, when I look at books that were popular with young people from when I was a child,Jacqueline Wilson was incredibly popular. I think she still is. 

Maeve Carlin: Yes. 

Ada Jusic: All her books are about like, the different lived experiences of other kids. So, um, single parent homes, divorce, having a tattooed mom. And children are naturally curious about each other and the world and that curiosity should be respected.

Maeve Carlin: I think you're so right about what you said about not wrapping children in cotton wool. It’s such an underestimation of how children experience the world anyway. 

Ada Jusic: Yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: As if we can wrap a child in cotton wool, as if.. 

Ada Jusic: Yeah, exactly. So I'm a mother myself and it's sometimes kind of frightening how perceptive they can be and, and how, um, you know, how quickly they, uh, they can intuit things, um from the world around them, even if they, even if they're not being kind of shown something explicitly. 

Maeve Carlin: I think also children find things that they can't talk about frightening, more frightening. When I remember being a child myself, it's always the, the issue that the grownups don't want to talk about that you start thinking about and worrying about. And what's an issue that's more loaded and fraught and heavy for so many people than migration?

Ada Jusic: Yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: And having to escape from, things like war or famine? Things that children, they might sort of vaguely understand what these words mean, but not fully. And yeah, I think we underestimate children when we think that they don't want to talk about these things. I think they do. 

Ada Jusic: Yes, yes absolutely.

Maeve Carlin: Speaking of how loaded this issue is, I'd love to unpack the title, 'The Power of Welcome' with you. And this might have come from Scholastic as well. 

Ada Jusic: Mm-hmm. 

Maeve Carlin: But we are living in a political moment where real meaningful welcome for migrants and refugees can feel hard to find. 

Ada Jusic: Mm-hmm. 

Maeve Carlin: Or is drowned out by misinformation and political rhetoric. I mean, we have only to look at the riots from last summer. 

Ada Jusic: Hmm. 

Maeve Carlin: So how are you keeping faith in welcome right now? 

Ada Jusic: So, so yes. Again ‘The Power of Welcome’ was the working title of the project. I wasn't involved in the development of, of that idea. But at the time the project was coming together, a lot of people were coming to the UK from Ukraine. Kabul had been captured by the Taliban the year before. Refugees from Syria were living and still migrating throughout Europe. 

As you said, there, there was, and still is a really very hostile environment of political rhetoric and misinformation. So I believe they chose that title to reflect a more hopeful sentiment. Because because to welcome is an act of kindness and love and solidarity, which really felt in short supply at the time, and I think still does. 

How am I keeping faith in welcome at the moment? To be honest, I don't really have a lot of faith in this, in this current moment or I can perhaps more accurately say I don't have a lot of faith in politicians or in some of the social media or media systems that we have at the moment. I feel like a lot of these things have become eroded, that refugees have become a political football and a scapegoat. You can point at them and say "That's why things are bad. That's why everything is wrong." But the reality is that a lot of governments have just largely stopped caring about providing a social safety net for people.

In the UK, 30% of children are living in poverty. And. at the moment, we have people squabbling over free school meals because, you know, some people are angry that some of those children might be immigrants. It feels like sometimes there is an attitude that it's okay for everyone to suffer as long as these particular people don't get anything.

Maeve Carlin: Mm. 

Ada Jusic: And it's awful. It's awful. Everything feels like a race to the bottom. But how do I keep faith in welcome? I can only keep faith by doing what I do, which is helping people tell their real stories, so it's not just all hate and misinformation out there.

Maeve Carlin: I think part of having any conversation about what it means to keep faith is also to be honest about when we can't or when it feels impossible. 

Ada Jusic: Yes. Yes. 'Cause, I'm, I'm not a person that was raised in faith. I, I am from a faith background. Uh, I'm from a Muslim family. But I, I was not, I was not raised religiously. My parents were very socialist. Um if you kind of know anything about Yugoslavian history, they were kind of from the era where when, uh, it was sort of becoming a bit unfashionable to be religious. 

Maeve Carlin: Mm-hmm. 

Ada Jusic: So my parents were quite sort of socialist. But I perceive faith as an, a radical act of hope. And it doesn't necessarily have to be religious. 

Like to have faith is a radical act of hope. It's believing that things can be better, that there can be a better future, that we can find solution to these things, even if in the moment it feels like those things are impossible.

Maeve Carlin: Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more, and I think if it was easy, it wouldn't need faith. If we could see the path forward or if we knew for sure that we would get there, or if we weren't seeing just like deep hate and ignorance and gulfs of understanding and compassion between people, who seem to not be able to see each other as people anymore sometimes, then we wouldn't need faith. We wouldn't need to, imagine a world where it can be different and it can be better

Ada Jusic: Of course. 

Maeve Carlin: So yeah, thank you for sharing that and also for being honest about the times where you are not maybe keeping faith so much at the moment. 

Ada Jusic: Yeah.

Maeve Carlin: I mean, we've been talking about your own experience as a child, and I know young people's access to the arts is something you're really passionate about and you also bring your art practice into the community through workshops, both online and in person. So why is this aspect of your work so important for you, and what impact do you think community arts have at the grassroots level? 

Ada Jusic: So I believe humans are naturally creative but as we get older, we put all kinds of barriers between us and our creativity. We stop doing things we enjoy because we think we're not good enough or we aren't going to make a living from it. So I think it's important that the arts are accessible to people from a young age when they still have that freedom from that kind of thought. Um, and it's sad that they're actually becoming less and less accessible with funding cuts, schools being pressured to focus on hard subjects.

Being able to think creatively is a transferable skill. Einstein credited discoveries to being able to daydream and to think creatively. But I think also to be able to have creative expression is just good for the self. I don't think we should just be looking at it as leading to a good job or to a workplace skill. It's also an outlet and a way to connect with each other at a time when communities and young people are becoming more atomized and more isolated. 

Maeve Carlin: Yeah. And, and when you talk about it as a kind of counter to isolation, it immediately brings me back to the Covid lockdown when every Wednesday evening I was sat in my bedroom making art on Zoom with a friend.

Ada Jusic: Yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: because it was the only way that we could feel some sense of connection and… 

Ada Jusic: Yes. Yes. I think what was one of the kind of better things to come out of the, uh, the pandemic was that, well, it gave some people, um, the time to, um, to pick up a creative skill that they perhaps wouldn't have.

Andit's just a shame that because of, um, you know, financial barriers and socioeconomic barriers that that wasn't kind of possible for more people. There's, you know, it's very much a divide between those who, um, in some ways had the luxury to, you know, be on furlough, for example, and they could like fill their time with arts and crafts and the people that had that, that, that were key workers who were putting their lives at risk.

It's a shame that we didn't kind of all get that opportunity to, to all have that free time to, to create and to kind of take a step back from the pace of the modern world.

Maeve Carlin: When so many of us needed it. I mean, I was,

Ada Jusic: Yeah. Yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: I was, uh, doing online tutoring at the time and, uh, a lot of the kids I was speaking to were stuck in their flats, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and, you know, experiencing the uncertainty and the claustrophobia just as much as the adults, if not more so. But you know, they may not have had time, resources, or access to any of those things that would've allowed them to kind of express and also imagine a world outside of the four walls.

And also, I think what you were saying, I feel like the pandemic highlighted that divide. 

Ada Jusic: Mm-hmm. 

Maeve Carlin: Because it showed us that actually if time is the thing that allows people to create - free time, unstructured time - how much of a luxury is time? 

Ada Jusic: Yeah. 

Maeve Carlin: It's impossible luxury. I mean, you have to not have a family to look after, you know, or time where you have childcare, or you have to have space. There are so many elements of it that just when you think about it, it's an unimaginable luxury for so many people. 

Ada Jusic: Yeah. So I think when people talk about like money and happiness and, you know, that age old debate of like, can money buy you happiness? Like on one hand, no. But one of the things that money does buy you as well as security is time. 

Maeve Carlin: Mm. 

Ada Jusic: Leisure time, time to think about what you want to do next in life. And I think that's something that gets overlooked a lot. 

Maeve Carlin: Yeah. Because we see leisure time as somehow frivolous or you know, not fundamental to our wellbeing when what could be more fundamental than time to express yourself and daydream or even just do nothing?

Ada Jusic: Mm-hmm. 

Maeve Carlin: Well Ada, I mean, I feel like I could talk to you about this forever. But if there is a young person listening to this who feels that they have a story to tell, but perhaps is struggling to keep faith in their voice as a creative- that there's a space out there for them or that people are listening -what would you say to them?

Ada Jusic: Firstly. Don't create primarily for an audience. Create for yourself. Make the things you want to make, what interests you, and do it unapologetically. Don't worry about being good or being cringe or being like your favourite artist or any famous artist. Just create.

And you'll make a lot of bad things. You'll make a lot of cringe things, things you don't like, things other people won't like, and that's okay. It's the only way you'll get better. You know, the only thing worse than making bad things is just not making things at all. Because then you'll, you'll never get to the point that you're satisfied with the things you make, and you'll never get to the point that you make things that other people genuinely enjoy.

Try different things, collaborate with other people. Do fun projects with your mates. If, if that's the kind of thing you like doing. Have fun. But ultimately don't give up when it feels hard because I find that’s often when you make the kind of like the biggest progress from between where you are and where you want to be.

Maeve Carlin: Thank you so much, Ada. 

Ada Jusic: Thank you Maeve. I really enjoyed our, our, our chat today. 

Maeve Carlin: Me too. 

We are so grateful to Ada for sharing her story with us, her words of wisdom for aspiring artists and her raw reflections on what keeping faith looks like for her in 2025. You can find links to The Power of Welcome, the Barbed Wire Fever article ‘To be Heard is to Be Loved’ and more of Ada’s work via the links in our shownotes. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Keeping Faith: A How To Guide. Subscribe now on your podcast app to be the first to hear about our upcoming episodes, and please leave a review or share with a friend to help more people find us. To find out more about the podcast, the next phase of the Keeping Faith Programme or to get involved with the Women’s Interfaith Network, you can follow the links in our episode notes or go to www.wominet.org.uk. Until next time, Keep Faith!

Keeping Faith: A How-To Guide was created by Women’s Interfaith Network. The podcast is co-produced by me, Maeve Carlin, and Adam Brichto. Our executive producer is Lady Gilda Levy. Theme music was composed by Jamie Payne and our logo was designed by Jasey Finesilver. Additional Support from Tara Corry.