I aim to distort the common understanding of heirlooms that hold embedded matriarchical memories by repurposing their history at varied scales and with unfamiliar materials: pins with pumice heads, crushed velvet shaped like organs, lace made from acrylic paint, and cameos cast in hot glue. My hands join those of sisters, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, tracing a lineage of craft, domestic labor, and creative resilience. It’s a heritage whose traditions and trinkets shaped the environment that raised me. Through my studio practice, I revere and pay tribute to their labor.
The plush, sometimes visceral expressions summon the paradoxes of the body. Creating sensorial sculptural forms that intend to conjure a transference of experiences related to motherhood, chronic illness, and intergenerational care. Using techniques such as sewing, crocheting, and casting, these soft and hard, sometimes penetrating hybrid constructions are part relic, as I explore the passage of historic energy. They evoke the tension between intimacy and exposure, support and neglect.
The works adopt bodily postures—slouched, draped, tense—and reference anatomical parts such as the thyroid and reproductive organs. They are grounded in the physical and emotional dimensions of femininity, drawing on the cultural inheritance of my Croatian and Italian matriarchal lineage. By placing these forms in positions of tension or rest, I query and hope to visually solve how female-identifying bodies are held, restrained, or preserved.
I contemplate how the act of nurturing can be rendered visible through form, color, and materiality, and how absence can be more resonant than presence. Quiet but assertive, these sculptures sit between nurture and strain, inviting viewers to feel what the body carries in silence.