My SI focuses on how I can show my experience in a different country and how it began drifting me away from my heritage and culture. So I asked myself of how I can show my culture and traditional clothing to others especially other students who are in a different country like myself and remind them of their beautiful heritage just as much as I want to remind myself. 

The topic is important especially for me because It is about the two different lives I lived in both countries. I explore this question by creating works that show me in my birth country and America. These works led me to the realization about how beautiful my culture and heritage really is which I further emphasized by adding 3D designs on my artwork to show how beautiful the clothing is in images 3,5 and 9.  By practicing using beads in different ways I was able to bring out the ………..  of my traditional clothing. I experimented with boxes, salt, ink and beads throughout my artworks. I felt that I should do a complete 3D artwork that’s a bit out of my usual style so i revised in image 9 where I completely shifted from using watercolor boards to a box. But it brought out the message I wanted to send more. 

How can I show my experience and beauty of my culture and traditional clothing to others? While also expressing the hardships I went through trying to rediscover that part of myself? I also want my artwork to encourage other international students to embrace their cultures and not put it aside, I want them to see their culture and heritage and discover its beauty just as much as I did throughout my artwork. 

My idea began with just wanting to tell a story of a girl going through what I went through but later  my work began shifting more towards showing the beauty of my culture while also focusing on telling my story.In all my artworks I used watercolor a medium that I don’t personally like. So throughout my artwork I was able to get in a lot of practice that made me like watercolor just a little bit more. I learned………………….. I experimented with a lot of different materials such as ink, boxes, salt and beads. Which are all things that I’ve only done once before incorporating it into my artwork. Which was definitely a risk I took especially with the ink In image 6. These experiments led me to understand.