My work tries to make sense of my home of Hawai‘i. I use whatever is at hand—paper bags, plastic to-go boxes, old slippers, things that hold but are not kept. These scraps help me see the lines between what people show and what they hide, between surface and substance. Living here makes you think about those lines all the time, culturally, economically, in the land and ocean, too.

I build sculptures and installations. I also make drawings. Sometimes I put objects in the world to see how they survive. I get lost in the layers of the land, of neighborhoods, of local subcultures, and of the gleaming consumer truth of tourism. My work can be playful.

Guilt is a big part of my art. Guilt about being here, about taking up space in a place with such a hard history. But there’s also love. My work holds those feelings side by side. Many people who live in Hawai‘i know the weight and cost of it. A place you love can swallow you whole.

I’m influenced by Arte Povera, a movement that made something out of nothing, and Tropicália, full of celebration, contradiction, and irony in its allegories of Brazil. Andy Warhol’s shadow is in my work, too, with his way of turning the everyday into something sharp and strange.