I make fiber and drawing based installations, assemblages and works on paper to memorialize my mother whom I lost to alcoholism and domestic violence when I was 15. These works range in size from intimate pieces to larger immersive works. I use a variety of fabric and flexible drawing surfaces as my medium, applying the skills passed down to me from my mother who was a talented seamstress.

The sexual violence my mother and I each experienced in our lives led to a self-loathing of my body, cultivating the anorexia I struggled with as a young woman. Now, I stitch and draw as a journey towards wholeness, both for myself and for my mother’s memory.

I started to work with fiber installation because I became attracted to working with light, reflective, transparent fabrics because it reminds me of the permeable separation between the living and the dead. In my current series “quilt suspensions,” I use a flat felled seam technique with transparent fabric. I combine these ephemeral materials with LED strip lighting and diffusion film as a proxy for my mother’s spirit. The layers of pieced fabric are suspended over this light-spirit as a shroud or mourning cloth. Inspired by Chinese funeral customs, the quilt layers become burial blankets that are offered by the children of the deceased and layered upon their loved ones.