Unreliable Maps II
Hand stitching and embroidery on two, layered fitted sheets
135cm x 190cm x 30cm
2025
Unreliable Maps is a series of two hand embroidered fabric pieces that map the fluid, blurred terrain of memory and migration. Made using layered bed linens, the fabric embodies memory, a material archive of domestic space from a life lived as a migrant.
These are reflections of my experiences of misremembering places, moving so much that eventually every place reminds you of somewhere else. Memory becomes fuzzy, yet some elements remain clear as day. It is similar sometimes for people too, little quirks, hand gestures, the bridge of someone’s nose, the moles on someone’s back synthesise to become maps of people I have known, loved, forgotten, re-remembered. This work is about disorientation and reorientation, forgetting maps and perpetually remembering them. Perpetually being in a state of ‘in between’.
My practice lingers in the joy of disorientation: maps that mislead as they guide, mirroring how we construct and misremember place. My embroidery speaks of moving through broken maps, relying on what I know to be ‘unreliable’ memory, what comes of it is an inaccurate map: one that privileges the subjective experience of space over its measurable coordinates.
The stitches, in their inaccuracy yet spatial existence perform a duality: from afar, they suggest coherence, but up close reveal their irregularity—much like migrant narratives that smooth fragmentation into survivable wholes.