In 2017, I purchased a three-dollar needlepoint of Jean-Francois Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) at a flea market, which ignited my many-media project, Driftpoints. Discovering that needlepoint in a pile of discarded textiles, my impulse to save it mirrored the image of peasant women rescuing scattered wheat berries. I sought out more versions, and these became my foundational working material. The first installment of Driftpoints was the exhibition Meshes (2022).

As I continued to study needlepoint’s conceptual and cultural density, diverse explorations across various media began to emerge. I experimented with printing surface fibers onto a separate mesh, grinding down their surface to free fibers into soft dust, brushing them into impressionist painterliness, picking out the stitches one by one, printing their versos, or encasing unfinished ones in carbon paper. Emergent themes like body/grid, constraint/freedom, and surface/depth led me on a cascading journey of creating new objects that is still ongoing. This ever-expanding process maps paths of evolution and transformation, offering a quiet, ecosystemic-like understanding of change.

This project is still evolving—both materially and conceptually—and has opened up other directions such as Pressure Points, Unfinished Unraveled, and Unstitched Printed (visible in Works), with new questions emerging that I will continue to develop.