Installation

unmade, 2024

featured in Fata Morgana at Worth Ryder Art Gallery, University of California, Berkeley

unmade, 2024

paper, gouache, pastel, ink, acrylic, thread, childhood bed frame

75”w x 38”d x 30.5”h

Project Statement

I find myself running back to home as much as I run from it.

Home can be a place of the fiercest attachments and most cavernous separations, relentless love and treacherous betrayal, safety and hurt, comfort and discomfort. A building, an address, an accommodation, but also an anthology of lives and stories, loaded with blood-bound experiences and secrets, built and maintained by intergenerational systems, home is riddled with bothness. Interested in how domestic spaces and the dynamics within them sculpt, manipulate, move, hold, and control our bodies and psyches, I investigate these overlaps and influences between familial dwellings and the self in my mixed media practice. 

The ongoing series HomeBody focuses on the body and the home as common sites of both healing and trauma and the integration of the two vessels. Exploring my own conflictions with (dis)embodiment in the home, I process issues of patriarchal gender roles in the domestic sphere, tensions of daughterhood, and emotional inheritance. 

In Unmade, these concepts manifest in how I view the object of a bed as a space designated for rest, yet so often plagued by restlessness. I reuse the skeleton of my childhood bed to support a quilt and pillow, both constructed from paper and the blanket embellished with renderings of my figure alongside familiar household objects. Historically an item symbolizing domestic devotion and familially one that signifies inheritance, marriage, or motherhood, this paper quilt is meant to point at and question attitudes surrounding femininity and its relationships with rest, sleep, pleasure, softness, homemaking, heritage, and mental-emotional labor.

a quilt with

12 studies of my laying body

25 studies of household objects

49 quilt blocks

244 paper triangles

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