Artspace Solo Show – October 2025 – November 30, 2025

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Sacred Sanctuaries invites viewers to reflect on the many meanings of shelter — not only as a space that protects us from danger, whether animal or human, but also as something inherently fragile and often temporary. The word sanctuary also evokes current issues around immigration and the increasing threats to places of refuge.

 

This work encourages us to rethink what truly defines a refuge. Is it a house? Or could it be a forest, a beach, a makeshift structure, or even a blanket? No matter where we are in the world, we instinctively shape our environment to create a space of protection.

Sacred Sanctuaries explores this liminal space — the threshold between us and the world — and what it means to seek safety, belonging, and peace.

Rooted in the ancestral practice of scavenging and salvaging, combining a hard heavy object, next to a light, supple piece of fabric, tying it, stitching it, using ropes and nets to wrap it together, imbuing the pieces with a sense of fragility and dignity.

Pieces are all created painstakingly by hand. The mark left by the hand as a form of footprint that evokes links to the past, that speaks of our resilience and resourcefulness. The chosen methods for making, using hand stitching, hand wrapping, rope making, knotting; all these hand crafts being inevitably slow, tedious and inefficient; maybe seen as a form of resistance to the values imposed by our current modern society, always pushing us to perform more, faster and more efficiently. It’s a visual language that celebrates domestic rituals, our shared humanity, and questions the relentless churn of consumer culture that favors the shiny and new over the scarred and storied.

 

At times appearing like real life-size constructions that suggest walls and separations, barriers or shelters, the viewer is invited to intervene with these spaces, to imagine himself or herself inhabiting them. In other pieces a tattered rug, has giant cut outs, making it appear like the hide of a giant animal, but its fleshy tone suggests it maybe human skin. Materials are assembled in the way of articulated hides, or skeins, hanging them with open wounds that reflect the ghost of the wearer or its inhabitant. Ropes and nets are created out of repurposed plastic and fabric to connect the many parts of a piece, to keep it together from falling apart.

Each piece is a meticulous patchwork of the overlooked and the undervalued, echoing themes of migration, climate change, and the politics of borders. The wrapping effort a metaphor to what human intervention does in nature, nets are placed in coastal areas to protect them from further erosion. Is it to protect? Or is it to trap? The nets and ropes suggesting the negative effects from industrial fishing to the environment, depleting marine resources and habitat destruction; as well as the immanent presence of water, its colossal force, the infinite silence of its presence reminding us how truly vulnerable we are.