Artist Statement

My work explores the unseen labor and emotional life that hold people and socio-economic systems together. I'm interested in making visible what usually isn't and often goes uncredited: the effort behind things that look effortless.

In today's optimization culture, with its technology-driven mandate to 'do more with less,' we're asked more than ever to perform effortless productivity. Dense stitching creates an appearance of strength and resilience, while hiding our vulnerabilities and tender cores. My work asks what it costs to hold up that facade, and what becomes possible when we stop. Alongside this, my work opens questions about value: why we reward speed, polish, and the appearance of ease, and what we lose when we treat slowness, effort, and deep attention as inefficiencies.

Embroidery's process is well suited to hold these juxtapositions at once. It is slow and cumulative and can't be hurried or undone without leaving imperfections; the labor is visibly embedded in the surface. I use chain stitch, French knots, and picot stitch — typically reserved for accents in traditional embroidery — to build undulating layers of texture: chain mail, densely packed coils, radiating scales. Together they hold a tension between strength and delicacy, protectiveness and open embrace.

I am also drawn to embroidery's long history as women's work, dismissed as decorative even when it was essential, which makes it the right medium for asking what gets labeled as weak, and why. I've lived this firsthand, navigating gendered expectations across my roles as a designer inside corporate institutions, a wife, and a mother — effort that looks easy rarely gets counted. My practice is, in part, a response to that: an attempt to slow down, stay with the material, and make this effort visible.