Heirloom
2023, installation, yarn, 3D print (PLA), umbrella
Installation video
“Heirloom” (2023) is a cylindrical structure with a sphere top. It is constructed by crochet squares and 3D printed patterns againsting the medal structure. A dim LED light was installed in it, which would turn on as the sun went down.
I learned crochet from my mother when I was a child. We would crochet while watching random cliche romance dramas. She seems to be careless about the ups and downs in the story but still always manages to watch them till midnight. I thought of that as her way of escaping the fiddling household. After years, I became aware of her struggle with her identity as a woman - being a good wife who takes good care of a family or being independent, taking her work as her priority. The love stories were never the reality that she was experiencing. She was born when gender equality began to rise, but the traditional expectations still identified women as an attachment to a family rather than an individual. She was not expressive with her distress as she kept them all to herself. The time taught her generation that tolerance is a virtue, and she passed it down to me like an heirloom. It was her way of protecting her daughters from the unfair comments of society, as that was how she found a peaceful mind in the culture she lived in. I grew up under that shelter she weaved, that bittersweet feeling of being protected but repressed. Now that we stepped outside, the sculpture spun and shook, but it was once the safest place she thought to be.
