Artist Statement

Value systems determine what is significant, who belongs, and how social structures are organized. My work investigates how hierarchies of value arise at the intersections of technology, craft, and ecology. I analyze how dominant systems, often driven by capitalist and imperialist notions of linear progress, privilege certain ways of understanding while rendering others invisible.  

I view craft as a technology rooted in reciprocity and embodied knowledge. Unlike extractive models, craft often arises through collaboration with materials and the natural world, shaping alternative understandings of progress and relationality. This extends into lineage, where human and natural histories carry values through memory, ritual, and care. Beading, introduced to Indonesia through trade with China and India, exemplifies these ideas. Incorporated into ceremonial garments and ritual objects, the craft signifies lineage and belonging. As beads move between communities, they carry histories of exchange and adaptation, functioning as a living archive of cultural negotiation.  

Plants are another form of living archive. I draw on plants native to Southeast Asia because they hold layered meanings: they are ecological entities,sites of personal memory tied to family and home, materials embedded in traditional craft and ceremonial practices, and commodities shaped by global circulation and colonial histories. Exploring these entanglements allows me to trace how value is produced, transformed, and transmitted across both intimate and systemic scales.  

Alongside craft and ecological materials, I incorporate electronic components such as microcontrollers, pumps, motors, and sensors to create systems that blur boundaries between human bodies, natural processes, and technological structures. These systems operate like living networks, questioning how technology mediates our relationship to the environment and to one another. Through this practice, I aim to reveal tensions within existing systems of value while gesturing toward alternative models of relationality grounded in care and the ongoing work of making kin across difference.