Having packed teacups, napkins, and silverware in my suitcases so many times, it has made me think about what makes a space a home. When moving from one country to another there are items that you are compelled to pack over others. While traveling, these items enter the public sphere; they are put in cars and airplanes, and searched through before they finally arrive in a new city and inhabit a new private space. I often think of the process of choosing items that are carriers of gender specific information, tradition, and identity to anchor my new homes; however, more and more it is in the unclaimed space of the airport or luggage that I have come to locate a home.
Currently I am packing metaphorical bags as I paint them in the studio. I use encaustic and layering techniques in my work to construct iconic images that connote an accumulation of history, movement and travel and enter into a poetic space where bags and suitcases become transparent and private lives are on view for us all to see.
In the painting installation ”Stranger’s Luggage” the paintings are stacked on each other and this brings in the “real” space of the airport terminal. Here the painting object acts as a purse or a piece of luggage. This mode of representation operates as a stack of luggage and by being grounded in the “real”, which promotes an interaction between the poetic space in the paintings versus their status as real objects in a site.
I feel compelled to make paintings and objects that contain the residue of this kind of history and express the nature of the transitory spaces in our lives. This kind of mobility and public crossing of borders travels with us into the private spaces as well as into our new schools and jobs. My work challenges notions of the home as a completely private space, immigration as solely a public phenomenon, and the decorative handmade object as purely frivolous.