Mother Tongue is a project about loss in real-time'; inspired by my efforts to teach, and my son’s struggle and refusal to learn Urdu as he grows up in a country where it is not spoken.

My mother tongue is Punjabi — yet I cannot speak it. All that remains is one phrase, broken down phonetically: ABBG TPOG PKIJ. Read aloud, it is a conversation between two people. One says "Excuse me, Ma'am. Drink some tea," and the other responds, "I drank some before I came."

Inspired by the building blocks my son uses to learn language, this work explores the loss of a mother tongue — and how my only remaining access to Punjabi is through the English alphabet.

Watching him struggle with pronunciation, I noticed how instructions on folding, rolling, and moving the tongue helped him learn new sounds. But each time he failed, his instinct was to stick his tongue out, or bite it in frustration.

On each cube, alongside the letter it displays, sits a word meaning tongue or language — drawn from languages that are either losing their native scripts to English, or have absorbed it into their own.