Tilla, 30, artist

AshkenaziJewishI was brought up with a very strong religious and cultural identity, but in a non-traditional household. My mum was part of the radical feminist movement and our household was very much part of that '80s left Stoke Newington scene. There was always a degree of balancing political and personal ideology with religious practice. To make keeping kosher dietary laws easier, we were vegetarian. I went to a Jewish primary school. We’d go on Friday to Ridley Road market to buy challah bread, and we lit candles and had traditional Friday night dinner to welcome in Shabbat (Jewish Sabbath), when I wasn’t allowed to turn on the TV or touch anything electric. As I got older and my mum left the more radical circles, we became more traditionally observant and moved to a more Jewish area of London.I loved Friday nights, the combination of ceremony and food, the quiet intimacy of carrying out religious practice in your house. I loved it when we built a succah in our garden. Synagogue was different – I loved singing together in a community, the way the person leading prayers also responded and worked with us, creating a wonderfully dynamic and harmonious sound – and I loved helping! The community we were a part of was very nice and relatively liberal, so I always felt pretty at home there and like I was participating in the services. For me, spirituality is about your relationship with God, but religion is about your relationship with people. It’s how you build communities with shared beliefs and values.When I was young, our Synagogue was far away so on Saturday morning we’d drive to get there, which is not allowed (even though a large number of traditional Jewish people do it). It always felt odd – “Mum, can we put the radio on?” “No! It’s Shabbat!” “…but we’re in the car!”. I suppose it’s only when you become an adult you realise how much of life is about the compromises you make to get by.My current day job is in a Jewish organisation, which means that I have the privilege of not having to constantly explain myself or my religion to people. It’s often exhausting being in an environment where you have to explain why you can’t eat or drink certain things – why you have to leave early on Fridays, and why you are leaving earlier now it’s winter than in summer. Having your heart sink when you see that all the festivals come out on Mondays and Tuesdays, so that for a month you’ll be rushing to prepare for the festivals, catch up with the work on the days you’ve missed, and have to face the ire of people who think you’ve had ‘a holiday’, let alone suddenly becoming general spokesperson for everyone of your religion or ethnicity. And well-meaning curiosity is fine, but how deep do you go? There’s several thousands of years of stuff to explain, and a simple answer is often simply not accurate.I cover my hair with a headscarf, which is quite a visual signal of my faith. It can act as a bridge and a barrier. It’s really great talking about and sharing points of commonality with my Muslim bus friends or in shops. It does mean I get asked where I’m from a lot, and when I say “Hackney!” they usually answer “Yeah, but where are you really from?” I’m pale but not quite English-looking and covered up and wearing a headscarf, so it’s essentially a “what are you?” question. Within the Jewish community, it often means people think I’m far more hard-line and closed-minded than I am, and they almost always assume that I come from a very conservative and conventional religious family, so I often have to openly signal my liberal credentials and to let people know that they’re safe discussing things with me.My work centres on themes of identity and childhood, and as my religious identity is so much a part of me it can’t help but be expressed in my artwork. However, I don’t use my art to put across any kind of religious message or to inspire faith. It’s more like background which helps set a context, and the work is definitely more culturally Jewish than religiously so.Luckily I’ve never had anyone directly accost me, although I have had people pointedly interrogate me – I’m fairly good at diffusing that, and I have quite a BBC accent so it’s never escalated and I often end up making them laugh which turns things round. Mainly I just get mistaken for other headscarf-wearing Jewish women (because we all look alike, right?).I think London and the UK are in general very tolerant, although I am worried by the rise in racist aggression. However, even if levels of targeted incidents have risen and we feel less safe, it’s nothing like the tensions in parts of Europe at the moment or the developments in the US. I also think that, living in ethnically diverse parts of London, I’m more shielded than I would be if I were living in a remote or isolated community in other parts of the UK. I love the way the areas of London change as different immigrant communities move in, the culture and history they bring, and the bits of British cultural identity they represent. I chose to be photographed in front of the East London Mosque because for me, it represents what’s so dynamic about London – it’s been a church and a haven for the Huguenot refugees, then became a synagogue and the spiritual home to the immigrant and refugee Jewish community, and now it’s a mosque and serves the latest wave of new Londoners to come to the East End. My grandparents escaped from Nazi Germany in 1939 and came to the East End – London is the reason we’re still alive.Religions survive by adapting and changing over time. I think the thing I take with the largest pinch of salt is the idea (which many religions have) of their branch being the true, original and utterly unchanged truth. Even in extreme religious communities, they make rulings on new developments in the world. Even if you decide to shut something out, you’re responding to it and setting your systems in relation to it. We all have to run just to stand still, but to deny that the Earth is moving beneath your feet is dishonest.I’ve been married for what will be 10 years this summer. We met when we were both 17, although that wasn’t my life’s plan! We had a traditional religious ceremony with all our family and friends, which was wonderful, but really my focus was on living together as a couple post-wedding rather than getting to wear a white dress. We are both Jewish but we have quite different backgrounds – somehow, at 17, we arrived at a similar place from two different trajectories and then moved off in tandem together into our future. Living with someone else for the rest of your life, really knowing and understanding and working with them and loving them is hard, and it’s hard enough without cultural barriers, without that person really ‘getting’ where you’re coming from. Having the same cultural and religious background meant there was enough common ground for us to concentrate on the other things we needed to work on. It was the difference between sympathy and empathy.