With “Undo” I made a piece about unfulfilled expectations and about realizing that we cannot control the other one’s actions and emotions but our own. The inspiration came from my personal experience of feeling closure and finally being at peace with something I cannot change.

Serving as an example, I made a sculpture of my birth father. I met him once when I was very young but I do not remember his face or voice. He did not call, and he did not write letters, he never was a father to me, and I learned that he was not a good husband either. Besides those facts, I do not know much about him. I know that he was in my life very briefly and a very long time ago. And I was told that I got his blue eyes.

Based on these few information about my birth father I create a solid torso using the paper mache technique and lots of newspapers and recycled lunch bags. I wanted to give the sculpture a light weight to show his minor significance in my life while the many hidden layers of text and emptied food containers represent the lack of communication and all the unshared meals with him. I gave him the face and body of a haggard and dressed him in an uncomfortable itchy jute sweater that is fitting like a straitjacket. The unfinished edge of the garment ends in a ball of jute and is sitting where his mind is located, suggesting that he could unravel his restraint if he wanted to in order to embrace his daughter but that he decided not to.

Mixed Media assemblage: lunch bags, wall-size, ink, acrylics, colored pencils, jute twine, nail, book clippings, found wooden container, 22” x 14” x 10”