Ancestral Garden is an installation with a deeply personal connection. It is rooted in the memory of my grandmother’s backyard—a place thick with scent, soil, and story. It was where we gathered, each carrying our histories, needs, and quiet longings. In the center, always, was Grandma—telling stories among the plants, her voice a thread that wove us together. This work honors that space and the way it held us, gently and without condition.

The work is composed and printed on single sheets of delicate paper that hold abstracted stills from archival video, blended with the humble textures of burlap, plastic mesh, dried banana leaves, and discarded packaging materials. It is an immersive environment that reconstructs my grandmother’s backyard and invites viewers to move through a space where histories of cultivation and belonging are both tended and remembered.

The sheets of paper and other materials are sewn together; they form a soft, sprawling structure draping across the space, rhizomatic and alive, like a wild garden in every direction. Together, these materials create a sprawling structure—part canopy, part terrain—alive with the gestures of mending and mapping that link bodily memory to land-based knowledge passed through generations. 

Ancestral Garden introduces a slower, relational methodology that merges site-responsive gardening with intergenerational storytelling, emphasizing the communal labor of tending as a counter-practice to extraction and erasure. It honors the time, labor, and resilience of our ancestors and today’s migrants who cultivated life while in motion. To reconstruct my grandmother’s garden is to tend to her memory—to document everyday actions and validate marginalized experiences. This work becomes a spatial conversation with ancestral presence, transforming acts of care into counter-archives that resist erasure. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “Gratitude becomes a grounding practice.” This work embodies that practice—an offering of care, continuity, and return.