Embodiment of a Happening: Family
This sculpture forms part of a triptych—a series of wearable pieces. In this work, I embody and interrogate the complexities of family dynamics within the diaspora. The snake and body parts serve as symbols, representing the tangled relationships that long-distance connections create: they can either unite people or drive them apart. By highlighting the senses of hearing, touch, and taste, I reflect on the limited ways someone living abroad can stay connected to their loved ones.
Louise Bourgeois’s work has always resonated with me, and her influence threads through my practice. Through these sculptures, I’m exploring the queer body—how it is read, misunderstood, and reimagined, whether in public or in the intimacy of private space.
With “Embodiment of a Happening: Family,” I reclaim the snake as a symbol to confront my own experiences of family, throughout performance, and bodily presence. I’m interested in those charged moments where I feel myself shifting—from subject to object, from insider to outsider—especially outside the family core. Making and wearing the sculpture becomes a way to inhabit and examine the push and pull of diaspora, as I navigate what’s internalized and what shows in family dynamics living in another country.
All of these entanglements, distance, desire, identity, belonging—become physically present in the act of wearing the sculpture. The bronze carries its own weight and history, grounding me as I navigate the uncertainties of place, family, and self. Through the performance of wearing, I’m searching for new ways to belong, to make sense of home across borders.
