Memorial Imprints
Memorial Imprints focuses on a horse’s tail and its reaction to different surfaces. The fibers of the tail are prickly, kinetic, and unpredictable. This work explores how the body attempts to manipulate the material as it discovers its kinetic properties.
Bright Moon
Bright moon is a work that investigates the encounter between fragility of material, tension, and balance. The work is composed of plaster pasted on repurposed wood. The cracks from the dried plaster are then held together through lace.
Summer-Midday
Summer-Midday is an installation exploring the relationship between distance and time through wood, branches, thread, and textiles. The materials have a common source based in plants but are processed differently, leading to a variety of properties and possibilities. This installation explores how these materials can interact with each other at different stages of manipulation, while bridging and connecting their similarities. Thinking about textiles as time, and wood as distance, I let my hands work through the pieces discovering space, tension, and arrangements. Each sculpture in the series paved the way for the next. Their shapes were constantly adapting and changing much how we have adapted over the past year or so. In a time of constant restriction of movement, isolation, and distance, we remain fluid in our relationship with others, whom even far away, we keep close to heart. This series reflects how time and distance can expand and change, much like the materials this installation is composed of.
“The Jiu Jitsu Project” (working title)
The chapbook containing all the poems of the work.
The Jiu Jitsu Project is an exploration of Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) as an immigration-based practice and its role in shaping Brazilian identity in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Born out of the immigration between Brazil and Japan, the history of the sport is based on intercultural exchange that is often masked in the sport. This project is an exploration of BJJ as an immigration-based-language that can be manipulated into fabric and text.
In the UAE, BJJ has become a phenomenon as the sport is implemented into the country’s military training and public-school systems. BJJ is now a source for many Brazilian BJJ teachers to immigrate into the UAE through the sport. The Jiu Jitsu Project explores how the sport, born out of immigration, now helps Brazilians immigrate out of the country.
The text created for the project are a series of poems written about an unnamed Brazilian woman who practices the sport to reconnect with her culture. The poems are then embroidered on a series of BJJ gis that express the tensions within the character through the contrast of fabric, text, and construction.
The project is made as a textile piece to better translate the movements of the sport into objects. Fabric as a material has a similar expression to jujutsu martial arts such as Judo, Kendo, and BJJ. They are not strike based martial arts, but ones based on using an opponent’s movement and energy against them. Techniques in jujutsu depends on tensions, shape, submission, and these are all qualities a textile can express. By embracing the similarities between the sport and the material, the project captures the tension of the sport in a singular object.
Sketches
