More on: Interviews

Most would dismiss this lone voice. You’ll always get one, they’d say. You can’t please everybody. But it bothered me.

It’s possible I will look back on my thirties as my most transformative passage.

I’m a little jealous of my thirty-year-old self. I miss how cute she thought she was. Her goal was to play as much as possible, for whomever, whenever, mostly solo because it was cheaper.

I would like to say that since turning thirty, my work has become more efficient, that I have learned how to say more with less. Unfortunately, the reality is quite the opposite.

But the Deep South always drew me… I became obsessed with cotton, photographing it almost like it was a rose.

I’ve experienced more beauty than I could have hoped for or imagined, both aesthetically and relationally.

Artistic desire led me back to the world I thought I’d escaped—computation.

I have learned that time is a gift, and never to waste it. Sit in silence every day. Trust you inner voice. Lean into what you do not know. Cultivate curiosity, love learning. Never trust fear. Ask questions, and through making, try and make sense of things. Art-making is an unknowable, untamable, wild form of inquiry. You never know where it will take you.

The accumulation of my diverse life experiences coalesced at middle age into conceptual themes of memory, community, and place-making—groups of stars forming imaginary patterns in my mind.

It has been rewarding but also difficult to reclaim the childhood that I left in the Philippines. I left when I was three years old, taking only sensory memories and the memories I carried in my blood.