Embroidery and sewing are the processes that play a central role in my practice.
I sew architectural forms onto a water-soluble backing which allows me to separate the stitches from this support. The act of washing away the backing demolishes the support but also transforms the backing material into an adhesive that, once dried, stiffens the stitches and allows them to stand on their own. The stitches remained behind to create an abstracted architectural form within the dissolved contextual space. I think of this “void” as a symbolic act of reclaiming and rebuilding what is once lost.
As the poet Ocean Vuong reminds me: in Vietnamese, the word for missing and remembering is the same: nhớ. This is the essence of what I try to do with my work: I yearn for something that I can no longer access. What I want to make is not a one-to-one representation of a house, but something that can convey the sense of loss, of longing for a nebulous thing that is nameless, formless. A thing that is embraced by and exists within the void. Working in tandem with the void, I employ abstraction as a formal strategy to invent new forms. These forms are withdrawn and distilled from different bodies of knowledge, such as architecture and urban/natural landscapes, in order to create my own abstracted visual language so that I can process and articulate my experiences.
As the poet Ocean Vuong reminds me: in Vietnamese, the word for missing and remembering is the same: nhớ. This is the essence of what I try to do with my work: I yearn for something that I can no longer access. What I want to make is not a one-to-one representation of a house, but something that can convey the sense of loss, of longing for a nebulous thing that is nameless, formless. A thing that is embraced by and exists within the void. Working in tandem with the void, I employ abstraction as a formal strategy to invent new forms. These forms are withdrawn and distilled from different bodies of knowledge, such as architecture and urban/natural landscapes, in order to create my own abstracted visual language so that I can process and articulate my experiences.