My thesis body of work is centered around the concept of the loss of home. Throughout life, one inevitably leaves people and places behind, often not willingly. For me, it was the loss of my childhood home and "the motherland".

 

   This piece is a landscape from one of my favorite memories, hiking with my father. When I was little, I wasn’t strong enough to make it all the way up the mountain, so we would take a break before the final ascent. We used to hang around in a meadow, catching grasshoppers to bring with us to the summit. My dad convinced me that his friend, waiting for us at the end, had forgotten his lunch and we absolutely had to save him from starvation. So, we would carefully cradle the poor grasshoppers all the way up, and his friend would pretend to eat them at the top. That friend drowned not far from this place a couple of years later, and my brother named his firstborn after him.