My work explores how memory, labor, and belonging are carried through the transformation of materials. I use processes like shredding, pulping, and casting to create hybrid works that merge the tactile with the photographic, holding both material and affective histories.

After my grandfather’s passing, these gestures took on new meaning. I began embedding archival photographs—taken during summers visiting our family in Ecuador—into pulp made from my own work clothes, connecting his life as a farmer and tanner with my own forms of labor and making. Each act of tearing or pulping is both destructive and generative, evoking the cyclical nature of being and becoming and the ways histories are remade through touch. The photographic image, when embedded in fiber, loses sharpness but gains depth—it becomes porous, like memory itself.

Through these acts of reworking and renewal, I trace how materials embody the intimacy of care and the persistence of memory. My work reveals how materials can hold the shared connections between land, sea, and body—the tactile spaces where migration and memory converge. These gestures of transformation open a portal between personal and collective histories, highlighting the enduring labor of presence and the diasporic longing for home.