Gedara Yanavā, Going Home...(2023) is an evolving exploration of Renee’s mixed ethnicity and cultural identity, centering on her Indian lineage. Through a process of re-engagement with fragments of family history and early childhood memories, the work traces a journey back to a formative moment—when identity was instinctively embodied, absent of conscious understanding.

“At the age of four I would dress in a sari and dance every day for my family in the living room to a Bollywood song that I called ‘the mermaid song’.”

This memory, ‘the mermaid song,’ captures an unfiltered acceptance of culture—a fluid, intuitive connection to self, expressed without the constraints of societal norms. Over time, these instinctive gestures toward heritage were obscured, distant echoes of a more visceral sense of belonging. Gedara Yanavā, Going Home... revisits this core memory as a site of reconnection, invoking it as a visual and sensory bridge to reweave the threads of identity, once felt, unbounded and unspoken.