Queen Mary too
A large-scale sculpture that evolved through several iterations, this work serves as a personal reflection on belonging and place. It is an ode to those who, despite the pressures of survival, hold steadfast to their dreams. While the price of both survival and aspiration is often unclear, the piece underscores the resilience of those who navigate between these forces without allowing one to entirely eclipse the other. The ship itself is constructed as a skeletal wooden frame, built from deck plans and designed to shift during its exhibition, reflecting the fluidity of movement and change. This dynamic moving structure, both fragile and resilient, mirrors the constant tension between stability and transformation that underpins our all journeys.
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Drawing inspiration from the Queen Mary, a retired British ocean liner now permanently anchored as a museum in Long Beach, California, the sculpture speaks to the paradox of journeying, both literal and metaphorical. The Queen Mary, once a symbol of luxury and technological marvel, will never sail again. Her once-dominant presence on the seas has been replaced by the irony of her permanent docking. The ship, which once carried passengers and soldiers across vast oceans, is now immovably tethered to land, forever separated from the very journey that defined her existence. This shift in her identity, from a vessel of dreams to a stationary monument, symbolizes the inescapable connection between aspirations and the realities of grounding.
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In this work, the Queen Mary becomes a metaphor for the loss of freedom, mobility, and privilege. Like a car raised up on blocks in a yard, stripped of its ability to move or fulfill its intended purpose, the ship is no longer part of the world it once defined. Travel and mobility, once symbols of freedom, escape, and possibility—are now denied, leaving the ship a relic of what was once possible. The idea of travel as privilege is starkly exposed: where once the Queen Mary represented a means of crossing oceans, of journeying to new opportunities, she now symbolizes a larger truth. Mobility is not always available to all, and the boundaries that tether us to one place or another are often defined by forces beyond our control. The ship, now static and immobilized, reflects the harsh reality that freedom, like travel, is often a privilege not universally shared. The sculptural representation of the ship was intentionally designed to sink during its exhibition, freeing it from its physical form and allowing it to transition into an object of dreams; untethered from the material world, it would drift into the realm of memory and imagination.
