‘Apartment Blocks’ began in 2019 as my senior thesis for my undergraduate studio art degree. I had been feeling increasingly homesick as a Canadian having lived in Virginia for three years. However, returning home never felt truly welcoming. The anxieties and turmoil that prompted me to leave in the first place were all I could think about.

In January of 2019, after a particularly rough Christmas holiday back in Canada, I traveled to Tokyo for a six-week study abroad. It was my first time in Japan without my (Japanese) husband, and my first time living alone since leaving Canada. I felt completely and totally alone and, selfishly, I loved it. There was no one I needed to look after, no one I was afraid of bumping into on the street, I was anonymous.

Wildly jetlagged, I would wake up at four or five in the morning and wander around the neighbourhood. Streets that in a few hours would be bustling with morning commuters were still and quiet. It was an eerie, almost magical feeling to walk along those empty streets - as though I was being let in on some secret world, a behind-the-scenes tour of things people are not supposed to see. I would walk by the quiet houses and imagine the lives of the people sleeping inside. What stories did these dwellings hold?

Soon, the jetlag wore off, classes began, and my morning walks were lost to more practical concerns of regular life. The feeling, however, stayed with me; it was the opposite of the anxieties I left in Canada, not quite the cure to my homesickness, but something to get me started on the path: still, peaceful, introspective time alone.

I returned to Virginia to continue my undergraduate program, I wanted to capture the eerie-almost-magic feeling in my sculptures. I began constructing medium-scale forms, which resembled the buildings I’d walked by in either form or feeling. These forms were then decorated with collaged decals, simple geometric shapes, and/or subtly textured glazes to reference their architectural inspiration.

A year later, in the spring of 2020, I was putting the finishing touches on the pieces that would be in my thesis exhibition when lockdown happened, shifting and disrupting everyone’s lives. I began creating new pieces at my kitchen table - no longer rigid, geometric forms, these new architectural pieces were softer, lumpier, weirder. I once again experienced the loneliness and isolation I’d coveted, but it was so different now. The buildings that inspired my forms had felt like unlimited potential, but now they felt so limiting and bleak.

Still, life moved on. Slowly, we began to leave our houses and return to the new normal of everyday life. I graduated from Hollins University only a semester late with this newly augmented body of work, which I used to apply for MFA programs. I moved to California in the summer of 2021 to begin my MFA program at Cal State - San Bernardino, and to keep looking for home.