Maia Ruth Lee, Bondage/Baggage

Narrator: These two sculptures were inspired by Maia Ruth Lee’s travels to and from Kathmandu, Nepal, where her parents live.

Maia Ruth Lee: I started noticing at the airport, on the conveyor belt, the luggage that was coming back from the Middle East, where the Nepali migrant workers mainly work. There was a very particular way they would wrap their luggage.

Narrator: Maia Ruth Lee.

Maia Ruth Lee: It would be bound, packaged, wrapped, multiple times. And it’s because the airport is also infamous for taking things out of people's luggage. I was just drawn to these objects as objects, just because they were so beautiful, and also they all had this very similar feel to them, this very handmade, very genuine sense of self-preservation.

And I really just sat with this idea for a long time. What do I do with this? I want to do something with this and the idea behind migration, diaspora, working abroad.

Eventually, I decided just to create my own that looked very much like these packages that I'd seen. The idea of labor is definitely in there. The idea of enslavement is definitely in there too, obviously, just from the aesthetical standpoint.