Human,
Approximate
The Soft Thing Took My Name, 2026
This exhibition is a farewell to a subject that has lived inside me for too long: being a daughter, becoming a mother, and the strange, soft violence of being shaped by both.
I write this as an artist, as someone trained in psychology, and as a woman who has spent much of her life trying to understand the emotional architecture of her own past. For many years, I have returned to the same questions: Where did this feeling of outsiderness begin? Why did I feel like an alien in my own family? Why did love feel so inconsistent, so conditional, so difficult to trust?
(Immigration later gave this alienness a landscape, a language, a legal form. It made the feeling visible in the world. But it did not begin there. It started much earlier, inside the family, in the place where belonging was first promised and first broken.)
As a child, I often imagined that I had been born into the wrong home. I believed in aliens. I believed they might be my real parents, somewhere else, somewhere kinder, waiting to take me back to my true origin. It was a fantasy, but also a survival mechanism: a way to explain the feeling that the world I had been promised was not the world I was given.
The figures in this exhibition are mothers, daughters, children, aliens, shelters and ruins. They are soft but not innocent. Their bodies are stitched, torn, inflated, leaking and repaired. They carry care, but also the exhaustion of too much care. They are fragile and overgrown, dry and still alive, falling apart and reforming again.
The work comes from the scream of a daughter who did not feel seen, and from the body of a mother who sees too much. I am both: the child waiting to be rescued, and the mother trying to hold everything together.
After years of returning to the same emotional ground, I feel ready to leave this material behind. Not because it is healed, but because I no longer want it to be the centre of my language.
The Soft Thing Took My Name is a soft monument, a family portrait from the wrong planet, and a goodbye to the wound that made me, fed me, consumed me, and finally became form. Although this exhibition is fully created with AI, the emotional work behind it is real; through this simulation, I was able to see, hold, and finally release something I had carried for years.
And somehow, through that process, something in me was healed.