STATEMENT OF WORK

The things I knot, weld, twist, and knead reflect my interest in the symbolic inversion of familiar and transcultural objects—finding moments when action and reaction give these things meaning, allowing the sacred to transfer onto these secular pieces. The things I make become vessels for redressing past stories, using their past to connect us to the present, reminding us how we remember and retell stories that shape the future. My forms and drawings sit within history; my materials and techniques are rooted in vernacular culture; my adornments evoke identity, beliefs, memory and beauty. Together, they challenge how stories are told and who is allowed to tell them.

To find these past stories, I engage with scholarly texts, archives, folklore, and mythologies across cultures to untangle narratives while also finding overlapping links. I am interested in what has been left out, erased, or forgotten—stories buried between the lines or lost through time. Working with fragments, I piece together traces of marginalized figures found within predominantly Western writings of the past and deep past. I string together how these figures transform across centuries, finding connections that feel less like coincidence and more like echoes of the same presence, reshaped again and again through history’s game of telephone, drawing on stories that have a throughline to today’s social and political landscape. Using beauty and craftsmanship, I offer some kind of redress to their stories, like an antidote to the violence woven into our history, their stories and everyday life.