The Weight of Departure reinterprets Slovak kroj embroidery as a contemporary meditation on memory, lineage, and endurance. Traditionally, kroj patterns carried ancestral knowledge and identity through the labor of women, embodying continuity amid social and historical rupture.

No longer embroidered on found suitcases, the work unfolds as textile compositions where protective motifs intertwine with stones affixed by shisha embroidery. Gathered from places tied to personal and ancestral journeys, these stones both obscure and reveal the patterns beneath, tracing the tension between visibility and loss. Through this interplay of pattern and obstruction, the work reflects on how memory and tradition persist through fragmentation—what remains carried forward when continuity is disrupted.