My current work explores the ideas of offering vessels, ancestry, alchemy, and transness. I’m working towards creating a homage to the Pacific Ocean, and making connections between my ancestors, untold familial histories, my personal history, alchemic processes of ceramics, color, and my transmasculine non-binary transition. I hope to create work that meditates on the migrations I, my mother, my family, and my ancestors have made across different temporalities. 

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As I began to incorporate ceramics into my studio practice, I found my forms becoming volcanic, cavernous, and mountainous with various glazes melting, oozing, and cascading off my forms. While my work had been a continuous experiment in form, color, and alchemy, it became a place for me to contemplate my family’s Asian heritage and the disconnect I feel from it. I have since used my work to address how fiction, abstraction, and alchemy work together to manifest missing links of an untold familial history. Now, rather than creating individual over-aestheticized objects with layers of colors and textures, I am shifting to make an accumulative, sculptural installation. 

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Thinking of the phrase “an ocean of objects,” I began to assess my proximity to the Pacific Ocean and how present it has been across many temporalities within my family. If I look out to the ocean, beyond the horizon would be the Hawaiian islands (my birthplace), and even further would be the Philippine islands (my mother, sisters, and ancestral birthplace). My familial history of various migrations across the Pacific can be related to my own migration across genders as I continue transitioning.