ㅁ (m)

This series started with a giant cyanotype bedsheet donated to me. I cut it up into small squares and reconfigured them to create a new abstract design. Sewing them together made me reflect on my mother’s mom, whom I never met because she passed away when my mother was only 20 years old. She earned pennies by sewing traditional Korean dresses, called hanbok, which helped put a tiny bit of food on the table. My mother grew up poor and malnourished, but put herself through school and made her way to America a few years after her mother’s passing. 

I put the bedsheet collage behind me and posed for a self-portrait in front of a giant mirror. I then created a sculpture of my mother, and a sculpture of my grandmother. I presented the self-portrait painting flanked by these two sculptures, showing three generations of women, as well as the angel in my hand representing the fallen first generation and a potential fourth generation, thus connecting all of us in a beautiful loop. This body of work is my way of reuniting the women in my matrilineal family across distances shaped by death and migration.