Mama Moo
Stitched plush toys
Aprox 25 cm hight

Seams of Inheritance

This body of work is made from recognizable innocent looking plush animals - lambs, giraffes, tigers - cut open and surgically reassembled into conjoined hybrids. The result is both tender and monstrous: childhood icons turned anatomical curiosities.

I find the tension between play and pathology, innocence and mutation to be intriguing. Despite their curious new appearance, children may often find these figures endearing, as adults often see them as grotesque. That split matters. This work peals and uncover, how taste may sometimes be handed down and rooted, how comfort is constructed, and how fear of what is unfamiliar and strange gets embedded in what we give - and withhold - from children.

Each altered toy becomes a small theatre of legacy, disruption, and uneasy continuity. The stitches stay visible. Wholeness is refused and the incomplete is elevated. By reshaping these familiar forms, I enquire what’s considered “natural,” and how what’s passed down can be reshaped and made strange again.

In this sculpture, I continue with the familiar soft toys. Object of comfort, intimacy, and memory. But instead of having these creatures conjoined as twins, I chain them - hand to hand, foot to foot, arm to arm - until they become a long procession.

What emerges is something balancing between a child’s game and a biological diagram: a twisted ladder that replicate the double helix of DNA. A blueprint of not only genetics, but of everything that binds us beyond blood - affection, touch, fear, resilience, inheritance in its widest sense.

It is always curious how the innocent can become uncanny, how comfort can turn into something excessive, strange, and even haunting when presented in ways that diverse from our norms, in this case, repeated and multiplied. The sculpture becomes a shadow in limbo shifting between tenderness and unease, asking what we pass on - through care, memory, or simply the way we hold on to each other.

This work is a poem in form, a strand of kinship made visible, and an invitation to imagine heritage as entanglement: fragile, playful, complicated and unarguable.