Touched Ancestral Land, 143 x 263 in

Touched Ancestral Land is a fiber map of the North Atlantic Ocean, North and Baltic Seas, traces the immigration route my grandfather made from Lithuania to the port of Philadelphia in 1907.
Environmental Fragmentation: I chose to use synthetic clothing due to its profuse use in the fast-fashion industry. Reclaimed cloths were disassembled and cut into small abstracted forms to mirror the breakdown of synthetic fibers into non-biodegradable nano-fibers. In addition, 200 wristbands fashioned from fabric remnant scraps were produced. In exchange for a band, the museum viewer prints their name and city in an accompanying journal, recording their dispersal. The project embodies the desire to physically connect with a lost relatives.

wristbands

Šiluva Museum, Lithuania

Cognitive Gulf, Gulf of Mexico, 96 x 128 in

Boston Harbor, 84 x 84 in

Cape Cod Bay, 74 x 104 in

Narragansett Bay, 15' x 10.5'

No 120, 10 x 10 x 1.5 ft

detail

Polar Oceans created from synthetic clothing and carpet padding, references our familiarity with the shapes of countries, but not the contour of the world’s oceans which are often considered shapeless voids between continents. The two polar oceans, Arctic and Southern, are plotted onto a field of polyester carpet padding and filled with gradated color fields of synthetic clothing, a nod to the cartographer’s practice of assigning colors to landforms.

Southern Ocean, 96 x 96 in

Arctic Ocean, 60 x 34 in

Paul Mellon Arts Center, Choate Rosemary Hall, CT

Propeller 1, Fiber, plastic, water slide, 48 x 51 x 24 in

Propeller 2, Fiber, plastic, water slide, 48 x 51 x 24 in