Queen Mothers of Eastern and Western Skies is a tactile textile installation. This work is intended to address the nuanced disparity of experiences between the artist’s Western-born, first-generation Canadian mother, and her Eastern/foreign-born grandmother of southern mainland China. By examining the epigenetic qualities of inheriting trauma on a physiological level, they raise questions about the social and biological origins of psychological development and identity formation.

This composite non-figurative portrait emphasizes bodily areas of harm to emulate the embodied nature of illness and highlight the interdependence of these wounds to consider how these phenomena are shaped by differences in cultural, cosmological, and generational ethos. Amidst these injuries the artist invokes fractured ancestral healing practices that were severed upon migration to Turtle Island, uncovering the many cultural traditions that were not passed on to them with assimilation, submission, and erasure being a defining reality following the repealed Chinese Exclusion Act of 1947.