A few months before the end of the year, The Dowse Art Museum invited me to create a work to fill an unexpected gap in their program. Although I was preparing for my wedding in December, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I created fifteen new tree sculptures to expand on my previous Pillow Garden installation.

This version of Pillow Garden differed from the earlier iteration at Studio One Toi Tu not just in scale, but in tone. I leaned into utopian imagery—snakes, fruit, and oddly out-of-place earthworms—evoking a kind of Garden of Eden. I’ve always felt that a true utopia needs a trace of dystopia to feel complete, perhaps reflecting my own slightly twisted worldview.

While I worked toward the show, the world felt heavy—war, devastation, and massacres unfolding on the other side of the world. I couldn’t do much, but I kept working, holding onto a quiet prayer for peace.

From there, I wanted to create a space where people could wander freely and feel a sense of childlike ease. Yet within this soft, dreamy fantasy—among the pillows—symbols like the apple and snake quietly hint at the potential for corruption. In the end, it’s the odd little earthworm that feels closest to me: powerless and quietly bearing witness.