Artist Statement

 

I moved to the US at the age of sixteen, and it was a transition that shaped my destiny as a person and artist. When I was still a teenager, acclimating to American culture felt a lot like survival in a world that was totally unfamiliar. As I got older, that turned into more of a fascination with the complexity and diversity of American culture and all it had to offer. Over the last 20 years, however, that fascination has hardened into a cold, hard look at the political reality of the American empire and the social psychology beneath it. My initial excitement and curiosity has evolved into a deeper exploration of the horrors beneath the surface of the so-called "American experiment." I have always been an outsider looking in at my adopted country, and my work is an expression of exactly that.

 

My practice investigates the structural violence embedded within imperial power, focusing on the United States as its most extreme historical iteration. I see my work as an inquiry into the wreckage of the American empire, a case study in the failure of imperial ambition. Mine is not a political argument, but a human one: the profound emotional trauma rippling through individual lives within the physical United States, along our border, throughout its territories, and across the globe in its near-universal reach.

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I look directly at the modern spectacle of suffering: the continuous consumption of global pain via mobile devices. I believe that rather than inciting action, the relentless proliferation of these images induces overwhelm and disempowerment, functioning as an insidious mechanism of contemporary control. Yet, within that shared grief I want to open a provocation, through my work,  to open eyes and hearts, moving past the illusions of empire toward a global solidarity and interconnected awareness that I believe we have yet to realize. I am seeking an awakening to both our collective grief and dignity, qualities that modern empire attempts to strip away and commodify into mere content for consumption.

 

I use embroidery thread because as I get older it becomes clearer to me that we are relearning our violent ways. We come into this world with wide open hearts and are trained out of this state by society. The violence and hatred that plague humanity gets reborn over and over from old stories and old ​wounds, like threads, that we carefully stitch together, generation after generation, handing this pain, this enmity, this fear down through the ages, over and over again. In addition, textiles are historically tied to the domestic sphere, warmth, and human utility. By using embroidery to depict the cold, devastating psychological wreckage of empire, I want to create a profound cognitive dissonance for the viewer. They approach expecting comfort, only to confront trauma. Finally, the immense, visible labor of hand-embroidery stands in direct opposition to the fast, clinical, automated violence of modern empire (like drone strikes or the endless images of death and mayhem on our phones 24/7). The time invested in the stitch honors the enduring weight of the emotional harm.

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More about my work and process can be found in the section Ask Me Anything.

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​CV (last updated 7/9/2026)