Project
Lockdown Diet, 2020-ongoing
In attempting to map my family’s pandemic diet, I found myself building an archive from the most disposable evidence available: containers for fruit, desserts, dairy, meats, and prepared foods. Their molded designs began to read like glyphs, fragments of a domestic language whose meaning was hidden in plain sight.
I began looking at these forms according to their assigned uses: containers for fruit, desserts, dairy, meats, prepared foods. Each carried a small piece of behavioral evidence. Together, they formed a map of consumption, necessity, comfort, anxiety, and routine. I was not only documenting what we ate. I was categorizing the material traces of how a household endured a period of collective uncertainty.
As I cast these containers in cement, their designs began to shift. What had been disposable packaging started to feel like tablets, fragments, glyphs. The molded patterns, ridges, domes, cavities, and labels seemed to possess a hidden meaning, as if the containers were part of an unknown domestic writing system. In trying to map and analyze my family’s pandemic diet, I discovered a new visual language for the concept of archiving.
The series also documents what feels like a cultural revolution unfolding in miniature: a seismic shift captured in the quiet absurdity of a plastic lid molded with classical ornamentation. Forms once associated with temples, monuments, and enduring institutions now circulate through the world as packaging, designed for a single use.
By casting these objects in cement, I try to reconcile the dissonance between their inherited symbolism and their contemporary function. The architecture of reverence has become the architecture of disposability. This is not only a flattening of form. It is a stripping away of cultural memory and meaning, one object at a time.
These works hold space for that rupture. They ask what happens when the sacred becomes trivial, when cultural inheritance is reduced to marketing texture, and when forms that once signified permanence are absorbed into waste. In this overlooked fragment of throwaway plastic, we witness the quiet disintegration of value systems. My work attempts to make that disintegration visible, tactile, and impossible to ignore.
At the same time, the repetitive act of casting and rearranging became a daily ritual. Exploring form, size, category, and configuration allowed me to connect with my inner child while engaging in a form of active meditation. As I arranged and rearranged the modules, I began to think about history as a set of recurring blocks: chronological units repeating with slight variation. As if some larger force were playing with a finite set of forms. Or perhaps it is us, humans, who keep rewriting history by repeating it, hoping each time for a different outcome.
