I’M ALLOWED TO LAY DOWN WHAT MY FAMILY GAVE ME (2023)

Photo and text transfer on muslin, cotton, tulle, wool, wire 

“I’m allowed to lay down what my family gave me” is an attempt at piecing together memory and knowing. As someone who is estranged from family, I have struggled to understand my relationship to my cultural identities and how I fit within our community's stories. With this piece, I work with my fragments—scavenging for childhood photos, Google translating old family documents, screenshotting street view images of locations I've identified from my family's immigration journey, and reading old journals from living back home—and image-transfer these fragments by hand onto cloth to weave. This is a ghostly understanding of what has clothed and sheltered me. I honor and carry its regrets, silences, hopes, and anger. And then I learn to set them down.