Soul Sacrifice 2023

This work began as an homage to my native roots and the generations who laid the foundations of my life. What started as an historical acknowledgment evolved into an intimate meditation on identity when I cast my father’s face into the piece. His features anchor the work an eerie, tender presence that links personal memory to collective history. By fixing that visage into the surface, I insist that family stories, labor, and everyday sacrifices be seen, remembered, and honored.

The sculpture’s surface is a collage of found and repurposed objects: nuts and bolts, mismatched silverware, fragments of metal and salvaged from daily life. These materials are both humble and resonant signifiers of work, migration, repair, and resilience. I arrange them to trace lines of movement and repair, to map a trajectory from scarcity to survival, from displacement to the attempt at building a home. Each object carries its own history; assembled together they form a new, layered narrative.

Formally, the piece balances texture and silence glints of metal catch the light while shadowed crevices invite closer inspection. The juxtaposition of a lifecast against industrial detritus creates tension between human vulnerability and the harshness of material life. Conceptually, it’s about transformation: how fragments of the past can be recombined into something that holds memory but also points toward future stories.

Ultimately I’m searching through materials, through family imagery, through the process of making for a sense of belonging. The work is an offering: a space where ancestral voices and everyday objects converge to speak about lineage, loss, repair, and the possibility of home. I invite viewers to trace the marks, recognize the familiar implements, and consider the ways their own histories might be cast into the present.