Artist Statement
Painting begins before its physical making. It exists first within memory, material, and inherited knowledge. My practice centers on Vietnamese lacquer, a medium shaped by generations of makers, including my parents, whose thirty-year engagement with lacquer forms the foundation of my relationship to it.
Having grown up between Vietnam and Ireland, I experience identity as something continuously negotiated across distance. Places return altered; memories persist while landscapes shift. Lacquer mirrors this condition. Built through layering, sanding, concealment, and revelation, it records time through accumulation.
Here, Where It Remains examines migration through the parallel movements of diasporic experience and bird migration. Birds appear not as symbols but as bodies guided by instinct, climate, and survival — navigating between departure and return.
The works treat lacquer as a temporal surface where traces emerge and disappear. Silver leaf oxidizes, shells fracture, and pigments darken. These transformations echo how identity forms through erosion and persistence. Migration becomes neither loss nor arrival, but an ongoing state of becoming.