As a mixed race person with Japanese and Irish heritage, the work I make is rooted in my family’s encounters with assimilation and the desire to experience ancestral belonging. My artistic inquiry explores the historic and sociological ghosts that haunt us; I seek to find meaning in the liminal spaces between cultural amnesia, grief, and resistance to the pervasive forces of capitalism and consumerism. Situating my work primarily in printmaking and sculptural practices, my artistic inquiry is engaged with using the inherent personality of paper to draw the viewer into intimate and inquisitive encounters with depictions of memory. My most recent work explores the intersections of grief, cultural amnesia, and resistance to the pervasive forces of capitalism and consumerism. The work for my culminating post graduate exhibition is an attempt to memorialise places impacted and lost to war and displacement. Through blind embossed printmaking, I interconnect signifiers of Japanese American, Irish, and Palestinian sites shaped by violence and resistance. In doing so, I hope to invoke a tactile meditation on the varied yet synchronous ways in which communities navigate not only the tension between remembrance and disappearance, but the possibility of resilience in the face of seemingly insurmountable loss. I am an emerging artist and community organiser who I grew up on unceded Anishinaabe land, colonially known as Southeast Michigan in the United States. I earned my B.A. in Social Theory & Practice from the University of Michigan in 2017 and am an M.A. candidate in Art & Ecology at the Burren College of Art. My work has appeared in various community and public art projects in Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan and Los Angeles, California.
