Artist Statement

Born in a refugee camp between Cambodia and Thailand, I moved with my family to Mississippi at the age of eight. Growing up, my identity was informed by my sense of belonging and not belonging to the southern culture in Mississippi. As my memories of my childhood on the Thai-Cambodia border become more and more faint as the years go by, the need to remember, to retrieve those childhood memories of a past life, has remained a constant drive in my work.

In my current body of work, I explore the reverie of time and the idea of home. The subject of home is an abstract concept and the motivational force for my studio pursuits. Using yarns and a needle, I stitch landscapes of the past to convey themes of identity, memory and longing. The concept of journey and memory are embedded in the current series of embroidered paintings.

My work seeks to simulate the impermanence of memory, the fleetingness of its existence, creating forms that translate the mind’s formless but living past into physical material and sensation and transforming space that poetically simulates a timeless place for recollection and dreams.