My current work tries to make sense of what it means to live in 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 line between surface and substance, between what people show and what they hide. Living here makes you think about those lines all the time, culturally, politically, in the land and ocean, too.

I use discarded things to 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. In a way, my work is for the people who built lives here, the people who were pushed to the edges, the ones still standing. It’s the cost of holding on, of staying.

I’m influenced by Arte Povera, a movement that made something out of nothing, and Tropicália, full of love, 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.

Art lets me ask questions. What does Hawai‘i mean in this time? Who is it for? My work doesn’t give answers, but it opens the door for anyone willing to step through.