I’m very intrigued by spaces and how they can affect and shape its occupants. As a child, I was always watching people, but was always more interested in spaces under the bed, in the crevice of a couch, or the corner of a wall. I would gravitate to those places and sit very close to them, feeling myself become separated from the world outside. I think that I still work in the same way, and am very sensitive to my surroundings, so the work that I tend to produce reflects how I was feeling within particular spaces.
As a child of immigrants and an immigrant myself, my fixation on space is a particularly meaningful one. I am constantly trying to find myself within the space of a canvas, even if it is through the portrait of another, or the portrait of someone that exists only in my imagination. These indirect self-portraits are distillations of my identity as a young woman, with all of my fixations, obsessions and anxieties. Over the past few years, I have found that I have become more and more drawn to the tension of a space – the need to fill it, the need to understand its strange sentience.