Sculptures
I spent 6 weeks with my 7-year-old son last year in Stanford Children's Hospital following his COVID-19 diagnosis. This experience, which nearly ended my son's life, brought up many feelings for me about children's rights, bodily autonomy, medicalized anti-fat bias, and the idea of losing a child. I see this topic as a natural extension of my two-dimensional work, which deals more specifically with cultural expectations of personal aesthetics, in that both themes boil down to questions like "Who deserves care?", "What bodies are worthy of admiration?", and "To what identities do we, as a society, confer full personhood?". With this work, I hoped to exorcise some of the trauma I've been carrying since we came home. As I watched my child battle for his life, I dreamed of a safe, cozy, loving space for us, away from the pain and fear, and in this piece I created it.