Ink on bandages, 2025

 

Nothing to Something: A Life Made Through Art

My artistic practice did not begin with clarity. It began with loss.

But even before that, it began with something unexpected: a chance encounter. I did not come from an art background, nor did I plan to become an artist. My early life had little to do with galleries, studios, or exhibitions. Through meeting an artist by coincidence, a new path opened — one I had never imagined for myself. Quiet, almost ordinary, that moment planted a seed.

In the early 2000s, I experienced the erasure of a personal archive — drawings, writings, photographs, and certificates, all swept away. What followed was silence, a rupture that forced me to ask what it meant to make art at all. Out of that absence, I began again. At first tentatively: portraits of my mother, collages made from torn magazines, small acts of remembering. Art became a way to hold on, to stitch what was lost into something that could still speak.

Over time, the language of my practice shifted. What began as representational and memory-driven became increasingly abstract, poetic, and material-focused. I turned to what remained: old passports, rubber stamps, and maps. Later came gauze, bandages, atlases, rotan sticks, sound, and broken vessels. These were not just objects — they were carriers of lived experience, of migration, bureaucracy, belonging, and fracture.

My practice has since evolved into an ongoing dialogue between the visible and the invisible, the personal and the political, the past and the present. The works I create are layered, unstable, and open-ended. They resist finality. They do not explain. They ask to be met.

I listen more closely now — to how materials speak, to how sound vibrates through absence, to how silence, repetition, and chance shape a work. Performance, participation, and installation have become essential components. Whether I am writing on gauze strips with overheard phrases, constructing drums from x-ray films, or imagining a clay vessel collapsing on melting ice, the gesture is the same: to remain present with what unfolds.

Today, my practice is not about becoming someone new. It is about honoring what is already here — the trace of memory, the texture of place, the breath between identities. I do not begin with certainty. I begin with noticing — with what is fragile, unfinished, already slipping away. From there, something emerges: not resolution, but presence.

 

“Read more about my upcoming exhibition Rhythms of Identity →”