06/08/2026
I use shredded money because even after value is destroyed, memory remains.
Every fragment in my work once belonged to a complete bill that moved through unknown hands and unknown lives. A single piece may have passed through the pocket of someone struggling to survive, through the hands of someone counting their last dollars, or through the safe of someone who would never notice its absence. It may have been folded into a waitress’s apron, hidden in a stripper’s bra under neon light, pressed into a church donation box, exchanged during a drug deal, carried by immigrants crossing borders, or stacked silently inside the office of a millionaire.
Money travels through every layer of human existence without judgment. It absorbs desperation, power, desire, humiliation, ambition, survival, greed, love, fear, and hope. Long before it entered my work, it already carried human history on its surface.
When currency is shredded, society declares it finished. Worthless. Removed from circulation. But I became obsessed with the idea that destruction does not erase experience. Even in fragments, those pieces still contain the weight of the lives they touched.
By rebuilding these remnants into large physical structures, I try to transform something abandoned back into presence. The work is not about wealth. It is about systems, memory, labor, inequality, and the invisible emotional residue that money carries as it moves through the world.
What interests me most is that every tiny fragment was once part of something considered whole, powerful, and valuable — and even after being destroyed, it still refuses to become nothing.
