Suspended Embrace (2019)
This project addresses the ~68 million refugees and migrants worldwide, and stems from seeing footage of aid workers wrapping emergency blankets around the shoulders of newly-arrived refugees. The tenderness of that momentary act of embrace and the temporary warmth provided by the thin material seemed to offer a brief reprieve from an uncertain future, given the growing backlash against those seeking safety beyond the borders of their homeland. This series of work explores the tension between the temporary and the permanent, the fragile and the resilient, and seeks to prolong or suspend the moment of embrace.
Diaspora (2019)
This quilt made of emergency blankets depicts the Authagraph projection of the world map in embroidered French knots. This projection more accurately represents the relative sizes of the continents, and is viewed from a celestial reference point at the north pole rather than privileging any particular country, appealing to a broader sense of humanity that supersedes national borders.
The areas with more green indicate regions people are migrating to.
Growing in circles (2019)
About 28 million children are displaced worldwide. Kids in refugee camps often fashion soccer balls and other toys out whatever found materials are available, and rope/twine making is a time-honored technique that imbues fragile materials with remarkable strength. These toys made from emergency blankets evoke the tension between the possibility of a resilient, thriving generation and the impossibility of being caught up in hostile geopolitical circumstances.
Passage (2019)
The parachute, which appears to be either deflating or just catching the air, evokes both a safe landing device and the miniaturized world of a childhood game. In this game, children stand all along the circumference of the parachute and fling it up so that it catches the air, enabling some to run across to the other side underneath the temporary dome before it collapses and find new neighbors on the other side, with repeated trials resulting in waves of movement.