Maia Ruth Lee’s energetic Bondage Baggage paintings are an expansion on her eponymous series of sculpture (2018-ongoing), which was developed in reference to the bound luggage frequently carried by migrant workers and other travelers at the international airport in Kathmandu, where the artist was raised. The paintings begin their lives as three-dimensional objects, bundled together with linen, clothing, and other used materials and then fastened tightly with cord. After dying the whole surface with india ink and other pigments, the cords are removed and the canvas is unfurled to reveal abstract, map-like patterns that bear the track-like marks of the ropes that bound the paintings in their previous form. The paintings touch on Lee’s longstanding concerns surrounding the physical, psychological, and emotional experiences of a diasporic migratory life, as well as the potentiality of healing and transformation that takes place despite, or rather through, mobility and rootlessness. Through abstraction, Lee’s work fluctuates between states of being settled and states of change.

The suitcase is a generative metaphor where luggage becomes more than functional objects of transport. They are vessels where memory, absence, expectation, and aspiration collide. Each painting begins as a wrapped canvas bundle bound tightly with rope, then painted. Untethered and unfurled, the compressions, creases, and folds reveal spontaneous, map-like patterns.