Surplus is an exploration of inheritance, identity, and critique. Working with repurposed military surplus materials—duffle bags, camouflage fabrics, straps, and pouches—I revisit the visual and material language that shaped my early life as a military dependent. My father served in the United States Marine Corps, and the objects of that world—its uniforms, containers, and systems of order—formed an invisible architecture around my family’s daily life.

These materials, once designed for protection and control, carry the residue of both care and command. By dismantling, reconfiguring, and stitching them into new forms, I seek to transform instruments of service into objects of reflection. The work honors the intimacy of family and the weight of memory embedded in these objects, while also examining the fine line where protection becomes power and care becomes control.

I approach these materials with both affection and criticality—acknowledging the tenderness and discipline that coexist in military life. In reworking what has been inherited, I’m interested in how personal histories intersect with larger systems, and how acts of repair, reuse, and transformation can open space for new meanings.

Surplus is, ultimately, about the complexity of belonging: to a family, a structure, a nation. It is about what we carry forward, what we question, and what we choose to remake from the remnants left to us.