PROCESS, DISTANCE,
LANGUAGE.

Sculpture is a constant presence in my work. From plywood, to soap, and paper napkins, the range of materials I use transforms the function of everyday objects, whilst maintaining their inherent qualities. 

I was born in Japan to Japanese-Romanian parents and grew up in Switzerland. Having not had a specific place to call home, I have always perceived what’s around me from a distance, attempting to find my place amongst culture and people. My practice is a tangible exploration of my identity as a third culture individual, yet it also aims to replicate the experience of connection and disconnection for the audience. 

Creating to me is always a ritualistic, time-consuming process. My process incorporates an aspect of participation, shifting back and forth from the personal to impersonal, and allowing the audience to share the experience of making. In my project Spală-te, I invited the audience to paint 20 hand-carved bars of soap, depicting traditional Romanian ceramic designs. I then asked them to wash the paint away, relinquishing control over my work and altering the intricate engravings in seconds. In my following project 100% Recycled, I gathered anonymous notes from the phones of strangers which I handsewn into paper napkins, once again testing the relationship between time and value.  

I am currently exploring our relationship to language and the distance it can both diminish and reinforce. Language allows connection, assimilation, understanding, but it can also be used to control and isolate. My most recent work is a sculpture-based performance piece, comprised of a large wooden stilted wall, separating the exhibition space in two. The wall presents a sentence, translated from Romanian to the audience that is progressively revealed word after word, through a postbox-like slot. Deriving from my interest in correspondence art, Let it Remind You tests the limits of intimacy by enforcing literary and physical distance between audience and artist.