Relief Maps is a series of landscapes built from memory and inheritance, made for my father and me, and for everyone who has had to leave one ground to build another.

My father crossed from China to Taiwan at eighteen, during the Great Exodus of 1949. After he died, I revisited the details of that crossing, the danger and chaos he moved through, as I began these works in that same period.

These pieces are made with two techniques. Through punch needle, a traditional rug hooking technique, I embroider yarn freely onto a stretched ground of monk's cloth, working in different stitches to build texture, density, and height, raising organic, undulating topographies from the surface. Couching embroidery lays lines and adds dimension, sometimes layering colors into shifting contours. One technique builds the body; the other animates it. Together they form terrain: ridgelines, troughs, and the high white of something cresting against the dark.

What I understand now is that I am building us a new land. When there's no place to return to, you build one. Stitch by stitch, your own place to stand.