Circle Mom, Square Baby

Welded steel rods, woven reeds. 42"H x 22"W x 28"D. 2023

This work was created for my Fabrication/ Materials sculpture class and also as a response to a student competition hosted by Collab PMA that asked contestants to create a vessel in a physical world that's inspired by Stephen Burks' designs. The big, round Mother carrying her child through the ups and downs of the nine-month pregnancy to the painful, often very long labor process is a perfect ode to this idea of mothers being the vessel of life.

In the Vietnamese culture, after a successful birth, the family usually shares on the jubilating news to their wider family and friends, saying that "mom is circle and baby is square", implying that both mother and child are healthy and happy. It is to reassure the beloved ones not to worry and instead to join the celebration for the blissful new chapter.

This design originally was supposed to have a drawer that would have been fitted into the cut-out space. However, witnessing a world where mothers are in anguish waiting for their children to come home or where mothers are feeling the deepest pain of their children having been killed, I felt that the design was complete as is -- with a hollow space inside.