I am fascinated by a child’s ability to create sanctuaries full of wit, beauty, and creativity within the chaos of poverty, war, and symbolic/physical violence. What drives my work is the question: How do children use their internal locus of control to build these psychological sanctuaries, and how are their ways of coping key to understanding fundamental human resilience?

Growing up, I was close to my grandmother, Yoko. As I got older, my curiosity about her childhood grew while her memories grew fainter. One story that struck me was her memory of her first air raid firebombing: looking to the sky, she saw "flying red seabreams." Her imagination transformed an uncontrollable situation into a fantasy narrative she could process. Flying fish makes perfect sense to an imaginative young girl in a war zone, providing a sanctuary in an incomprehensible world. This memory started my ongoing exploration into how children process trauma and interpret their world.