Form: Between Worlds

I grew up in Hawaii, running barefoot in the mountains and swimming in the ocean before I could walk. That childhood shaped everything. Color, movement, curiosity, the feeling of witnessing something bigger than myself. Honolulu is a multicultural crossroads, and I was steeped in it without even realizing how lucky we were to be in the flow of so much culture moving through the islands. My relatives came from Japan generations ago. I am Hapa, half Asian and half Caucasian, not from here or there, always a little othered, light skinned but mixed race. That sense of in-between has always lived in me. It still does.

I was a creative, curious child. I studied plants, talked to animals, watched patterns, collected everything. That instinct to observe and gather has stayed with me. To collect is to be present to the energy of things. It is still how I work.

When I was older I lived in New York and became a textile designer. I was in love with color, pattern, beauty, fashion, surface. I grew up thrifting in Hawaii, collecting psychedelic house dresses and wildly patterned muu muus, and my love of costume and expression though pattern and color started there. Color has always been a language I feel deeply moved by.

For years I painted on an easel, but something felt disconnected. I wanted to get inside my work. I wanted to feel it. Touch it. Move with it. I wanted the process to be physical, tactile, visceral. And when I allowed my hands to lead, something happened. I found that my hands speak another language entirely. A language of cloth, gesture, material.

Milan Kundera wrote that there are “many people, few gestures”. Folding, shaking, smoothing fabric… these gestures have been performed by women for generations. They carry the memory of labor and lineage. When I drag a wet canvas across the ground or smooth color into cloth, I feel that history. I feel the presence of women’s work behind me, around me, in me.

I work on the floor, soaking the canvas with water, laying pigment in washes until the surface feels alive. Flooding, wringing, smoothing. There is Helen Frankenthaler somewhere in the room. There is Magdalena Abakanowicz. There is Mrinalini Mukherjee. They are not literal references but energies, ghosts, companions in the act of creation. These pieces become obake, flowers, seed pods, things with breath and memory. Symbols of regeneration. Fertile presences glowing under my hands.

They emerge from chaos and show themselves slowly. Order forms, dissolves, reforms. They gather and fall apart. They breathe. I watch them become themselves and feel myself changing with them.

So much of this comes from my past: From thrifted dresses, from running wild in the wet mountains. From New York design studios. From being Hapa in a world that likes categories. From science class and tidepools and the strange mix of curiosity and longing that shaped me from childhood.

Painting became object for me. Garment became sculpture. Cloth became story. Folded paintings became a way to speak in a poetic, visual language. Presence, not picture. Object, not surface. Something alive enough to be arresting.

This is where the work comes from. A lifetime of color, culture, lineage, and curiosity folded into form. A way of making that is both ancient and entirely my own. A way of finding order inside the beautiful, fertile chaos. A way of watching the world breathe and breathing with it.