This installation is a full-scale refugee tent, constructed entirely from sewing pattern paper and hand-sewn together, piece by piece produced during a residency in 2025. As you would enter, you’d hear a layered soundscape of snippets from refugee life: a baby’s cry, a mother’s lullaby, children at play, rain, the wild environment, footsteps, gunfire. Woven into these are the intimate sounds of the tent’s creation: scissors snipping, paper tearing, thread pulling through paper.

The tent invites you to explore it. In daylight, it glows—its translucent walls radiating a warmth that is both inviting and haunting. Its stitched seams and fragile skin reflect the makeshift shelters millions of refugees must rely on: plastic, canvas, tarp; impermanent materials against a brutal world.

Scattered across the floor are torn and crumpled sewing patterns, the same material as the tent. These represent shattered lives and interrupted dreams, a quiet testament to the trauma of displacement. This tent is both a refuge and a warning.

There are over 120 million displaced people in the world today. My work asks: what does it mean to turn away from them? What would it mean to imagine ourselves in their place?

We are not as far from that tent as we think.