I thought that once I became a U.S. citizen, the border would disappear.

It didn't.

The border didn't go away.

It moved.

Now it lives inside my body.

It appears when I speak, when my accent arrives before I do, when my voice passes through a filter before it comes out.

Without realizing it, I stopped being spontaneous.

I began listening to myself before speaking, correcting myself in silence, choosing safer words. I learned to process myself before the system had to.

No one asked me to.

My body simply understood.

The correction happened without instruction.

The adjustment happened quietly.

I no longer cross a border.

I carry it.

That realization transformed my practice.

Working across painting, ceramics, installation, and video, I investigate how prolonged bureaucratic systems reorganize the body and its relationship to time. My work does not focus on immigration as a political event, but on what remains after years of waiting, documentation, repetition, and uncertainty become embodied.

Using personal archives, administrative language, everyday objects, and symbolic materials, I create works that reveal what official records cannot: the invisible ways a body adapts to prolonged systems of control. My installations, sculptures, paintings, and videos trace the residue left by bureaucracy—not in documents, but in gesture, language, memory, and perception.

I once believed the immigration process would end with approval.

Instead, I discovered that the paperwork ended long before the body did.

The system didn't simply teach me to wait.

It taught my body how to inhabit uncertainty.

Today, my work asks a different question.

Not where the border is—

but what remains after the body has carried it for so long that it no longer recognizes it as weight.