ARTIST STATEMENT
 
I engage with cultural forms of memory and representations of trauma through my creative practice. Often the starting point of my creative projects is deep research in a particular historical event or events of contemporary significance. My earlier projects have comprised of a series of installations that memorialize partitions and ethnic fissures occurring in the 20th century. In a recent project, I expanded the scale of my work to include architectural spaces and monuments as sites of memory. I made latex casts of the monuments to allude to the material body of the monument, and incorporated video and archival text in the resulting installation. In another recent project, I mined historical archives of post-world war I events, and utilized small but evocative vessels as containers of memory. Installed in experiential environments, these projects function as mobile and temporary memorials.

My works function as "memory sculptures," rooted in the visual and aesthetic practices of post-minimalist art. The primary output of my studio practice has been large-scale sculptural, site-sensitive installations that reference the scale of the body as it is reproduced in and through the national. I am very inspired by the metaphorical and allegorical potential of skin - maps as the skin of the nation, and the skin of monuments as a dense palimpsest of accumulated meanings over time. In my projects, I work with skin-like materials, such as latex and silicone rubber, hog gut, handmade paper, translucent fabric encased in wax, and so on.

In addition to my studio practice, I have founded the Transdiaspora Project, an ongoing series of curated exhibits that seek to bring together artists from multiple diasporic locations around overlapping themes. My creative practice is a symbiosis of research, studio practice, and curatorial projects.

As filmmaker Mira Nair has noted, "The more specific and more local the story you tell, the more universal it becomes." This is a significant post-universalist call in the highly globalized and interconnected world that we live in. I believe that as a cultural producer, while I definitely have a specific and situated location, I also have the ability to create work that exceeds it to create empathetic bridges between people from multiple locations. I believe that the role of transnational feminism today is to bring bridges into being even when it seems untenable to do so. Creating bridges is one of the primary motivations that sustains my creative practice as an artist, curator, and scholar.