Nothing to Something: A Life Made Through Art

Ink on bandages, 2025

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. It was through meeting an artist by coincidence that a new path opened — one I had never imagined for myself. That moment, quiet but pivotal, led me to begin making art.

In the early 2000s, I experienced the erasure of a personal archive — drawings, writings, photographs, and certificates, all swept away. What followed was a period of silence, of reevaluating what it meant to make art. Out of that rupture, 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 started working with what remained: old passports, rubber stamps, maps, gauze, bandages, atlases, sound, rotan sticks, 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 often layered, open-ended, and unstable. They refuse finality. They do not explain. They ask to be met.

In recent years, I have become more attentive to process: to how materials speak, to how sound vibrates through absence, to how silence, repetition, and chance can 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 collapse 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 fixed ideas. I begin by noticing. What emerges from there may carry echoes of the past, but it is shaped by the act of seeing now.

This is where I make from. Not certainty. But attention.