Artist Statement

I construct visual and emotional spaces where diasporic narratives of loss and beauty reside. My practice is rooted in grief, memory, and the architectures of care that shape both personal and collective histories. Through iterative articulations of installations, performances, drawings, and writings, I assemble a collection of autobiographical abstraction and figurative storytelling. In the menial labor of accumulating and transforming materials—glass, silk, local river and creek water—I ask myself what holds us together: stories, yearnings, rituals, and spirituality.

In recent years, my work has centered on contextualizing grief within the American South, a grief that remains unformed and unspoken in siloed communities of immigrants and migrants. It is an intergenerational grief, seeded by the Western violence of displacement and alienation, that requires new ways of witnessing and holding space. My compositional craft and strategic aesthetics in abstraction offer multiple points of entry, creating a landscape where grief can reside—fluid, shifting, uncontained yet deeply felt.

After a decade of committing my practice to hand-shredding silk flowers, I now accumulate teardrop-shaped, hand-blown glass vessels to hold local river and creek water. This choice embodies a need to formulate lyricism in grief—to give form to what resists articulation. I am drawn to the river’s constant movement, its choreography of mourning and renewal. In my childhood memories, rivers were sites of washing, mourning, and rejoicing. In a larger context, rivers hold ecological and historical memory—tracing abundance, erasure, borders, and power. The water I gather carries these layered histories, allowing me to engage with place, ancestry, and the persistence of life amid loss.

Community engagement has become essential to how I consider making and remembering. What once was an intimate, insular autobiographical narrative is now situated within a culturally emergent and relevant framework—one that interrogates American history and its violent impact. Through site-responsive installations, sculpture, and writing, I seek to create spaces that hold collective grief, resilience, and the unseen labor of mourning. At the heart of my practice is a deep devotion to finding the poetics of grief and beauty, to asking how we might grieve together, and to constructing spaces where loss can be held with tenderness and insistence.