(gentle music) - A lot of what I have been focused on in my work is human's relationship to the natural environment and how things are connected.

Thinking about how we can do better.

How everything's connected.

You can't just do what's best for humans and ignore everything else and think that that's going to work 'cause it's all one big system.

(gentle music) Art is always more powerful when you're trying to get people to have something to think about and form their own ideas and opinions instead of just dictating my ideas and opinions.

And especially if you're gonna try to make art, that incorporates things from cultures and countries that aren't yours.

History is something of deep interest to me.

I listen to history podcasts while I'm working and audio books.

Travel is such a big part of my work and I think to really understand where you're traveling and get the most out of those experiences and those cultural exchanges, it's important to try to also understand that history.

You can't really enter a culture without some level of understanding.

My interest in Eastern Europe first came about, we had a girl from Belarus stay with us one summer when I was 10 as part of a program to try to get kids out of radiation.

I did a trip with my middle school the summer after I finished eighth grade and saved up money to be able to go.

I was always really independent and I wanted to have the freedom to explore and you know, wander around museums at my own pace.

If I saw somewhere cool, I wanted to be able to stop and look at it and I wasn't able to do it.

I think it was a bit of a let down because of that.

My last couple of years of college and for a year after, I had taught English in Italy during the summer with the program that allowed me to be able to travel.

And on those trips, I was able to explore Europe on my own.

That's when I really started doing embroidery a lot in my work.

I knew I wanted to do something with conceptual map making to also engage with history.

Vienna has the only globe museum in the world.

That collection, the national library also has a lot of maps.

So I ended up finding these historic maps from the Frank Oppression War to World War II era that personified all the different countries into kind of stereotypes.

I used those as a base using transfers onto cotton paper.

I sewed the outlines of those maps and then overtop, sewed infographics from the refugee crisis.

Because when I arrived in Vienna in September, 2015, that when it was at its peak.

Hundreds of thousands of people were coming from Syria, other parts of the Middle East, North Africa, a lot of European countries.

It was also around the time of World War I anniversaries.

I wanted to make that connection for people of how the open borders in the EU, people were rebuilding walls.

You know, layer those together and adding that tactility I think is really helpful because infographics are very cold.

(upbeat music) This is my project for the exhibition More Than Shelter.

here at Virginia MOCA.

The title of the project is Cross-Pollination.

And I was addressing this theme through looking at the lens of biodiversity and how caring for other creatures in our environment actually improves our lives.

They're called bee hotels.

They don't actually live in them.

What they do is they lay eggs in them and the eggs mature and then we get the new native bees that way.

Ensuring the next generation basically is what these will do.

And then we placed in different locations outside after the exhibition.

When approaching this, I was thinking about what I could do within this realm of biodiversity, and I really loved the idea when I was thinking about bee hotels and making something that is literally a shelter for this exhibition.

(gentle music) I do think we're realizing more and more how interconnected everything is and that we can't keep going the way we are.

I think that there are new projects that are starting to address that.

So I am hearing a lot more about native species and native plants more and trying to find ways to protect them as we're realizing all the mass extinctions that are happening and how endangered many of our ecosystems have become.

(gentle music)