Mother Crossings reflects my family’s displacement through a selection of images gathered from our personal archives. Fragmented into shapes analogous to land masses, the work attempts to piece together our memories to create a “whole” family tree. The sculptural surface records the movement of my hand in the act of handling xerox copies of family documents and photographs over moist paper mache and pulp.

Here, the process of photocopying echoes the idea that the home in diaspora is always a “bad copy” of the motherland. Even if we eat the same food, speak the same language, and consume the same media and news as those in the motherland, there is still the difference in context that makes the home in diaspora markedly different. In other words, whatever home we make in a new land, it may resemble but can never be nearly as good as the original. The best we can do is to make do with what we have around us.