How found and made objects are used to create a space of identity and belonging

I used to think my work was about the mixed experience and diaspora in general, but it is more defined by the particular colonial entanglement of my situation. I am somewhat assured of my Englishness- as the place where I was born and raised. Yet with the “Other,” I feel a lack of ownership over my own identity. Perhaps that is an outcome of being the child of one immigrant parent who is an ethnic minority in his home country. I make art to world build, I carve a space where I do belong, where I feel safe to claim specific cultures as mine. My sculptures grow from a foundation of found, domestic objects, interweaving personal narrative through rattan fibres and ceramics, forming abstract, domestic totems. Through the Critical Model Thesis, I want to examine how objects embody cultural experience, and what different modes of reproducing and mimicking these objects does to activate them and how that allows me to gain authorship.