As a multidisciplinary artist, I am drawn to process where meaning is developed and emerged through labour, resistance, and flexibility. My main mediums are metal, wood and related mundane materials of Vietnamese households and culture. I try not to focus on a fixed outcome; the work evolves, shaped by the material’s own language and the marks it leaves. Welding and carving become acts of translation as I combine my own intentions and meaning behind choosing a specific material. It is a part of navigating and understanding. Symbolism unfolds through both material and poetry. I challenge over-explaining by allowing absence within my work for the audience to enter as how I curate the work lay as a tool of further highlighting its cause and place in a space.

At the core of my practice is my dual-binding heritage of being a British-born Vietnamese individual to immigrant Vietnamese parents. Navigating between the two language comes encounters of fractures in-between beyond verbal communication.

Miscommunications, mistranslations, is there a translation? Vì con cũng thương _ _ nữa, we become frustrated. Ongoing guilt, constant becoming.

I am my mother’s daughter. My relationship with my mother becomes a recurring point throughout my project which informs my symbolism, my writing, and my chosen material within my art. For instance, her name: Hoa (flower) and/or Hồng (pink) can be traced within the artworks. I can see her, my, our forms of love that often exist past spoken language. Food, action and gestures. I return to these experiences as materials and processes as a way of understanding how I am shaped by her maternal love, and how I continue to navigate that connection in my artworks.

An ode to what it is like being my mother’s daughter.