Lily Tsutsumida has 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 Lily has procured her materials, the most prolific was the treasure trove of her childhood home. Lily’s mother, who died when she 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 the family’s basement, taking on an air of sacredness. Over the years of Lily’s adult life, she 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, Lily made her final sojourns up to her family’s lost home, undertaking her most significant hunt to date as she and her brother searched the wreckage for surviving relics of their family’s history. The archeology of her life was visible in the rubble. Bathroom tiles that she had once stood on assessing her changing body as a teen. Lumps of melted metal that she guessed might have been one of her first cast sculptures. Perhaps the most devastating, the charred metal spines of the dozens of family photo albums that told the story of her childhood.

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