Reconstructing Home: Eaton Fire Reflections

I’ve been collecting art materials for twenty years, selecting items for their texture, their beauty, their oddness, their symbolic associations, their history and their personal significance. Of the locales where I have procured these materials, the most prolific was the treasure trove of my childhood home in Altadena. My mother, who died when I was 13, was a creative person and a woman of many crafts. After her death, her hoard of fabric, building materials, paper, leather scrap from the 1970’s, and bins of miniatures lay untouched in our family’s basement, taking on an air of sacredness. Over the years of my adult life, I would visit this basement to hunt for gems, often finding just the material needed for an art piece or current project.

In January of 2025, that home, that basement, and every personal belonging therein burned in the Eaton Fire, a devastating wildfire that leveled 4,356 single-family homes. After the ashes settled, I made my final sojourns up to the ruined lot, undertaking my most significant hunt to date as I searched the wreckage for surviving relics of my family’s history. The archeology of my life was visible in the rubble. Bathroom tiles that I once stood on assessing my changing body as a teen. Lumps of melted metal that might have been my first cast sculpture. Perhaps the most devastating, the charred metal spines of the dozens of family photo albums that told the story of my childhood.

Reconstructing Home is a personally reflective body of work that honors my lost childhood home by breathing new life into its wounded forms. In some of the works in this series, I combine salvaged architectural elements with materials from my collection, juxtaposing grit and gentle craftsmanship in a manner that parallels the messiness and delicacy of conscious grieving. In others, I use mixed media, drawing and embroidery to articulate the nonlinear nature of memory and family history, combining these with salvaged objects and natural materials.