During my flight from Philly to Toronto and back, the journey home—which has become my most frequented route since starting my MFA at Penn—I found myself thinking about sculpture a lot. How could I shape this experience, this specific one, along with the myriad ones from my past and those yet to come, into a form? 

In my pocket notebook, I scribbled down the words that kept reappearing in my brain: the lines, the wait times, the waiting rooms, the gate, the borders, the security, the babble of unfamiliar languages, moving and migrating, going home and leaving it behind, the things I carried, the old places and the new ones, displacement, fear, violence, void, freedom, lost, belonging, and guilt.

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I looked at my luggage, and I saw the plastic wrap encasing it—a layer of protection and differentiation. In that material and act of wrapping, I felt a deep sense of care(fulness), self-preservation, and fear. They don't stay for long—I strip them away upon arrival, a gesture that fills me with a pang of profound sadness. It's as if, in my mind, these discarded plastic shells connected the dots, weaving together all that I wanted to express with these transparent remnants, these plastic ghosts.

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