The Virgin Mary Security Door began through my experience growing up in a working-class household in Los Angeles, where my father and I fabricated ornamental security doors and window guards for homes throughout the city.

The security screen door became an object I associated with protection, fear, domestic routine, and economic survival. It is a common architectural element throughout East Los Angeles — constructed from inexpensive materials such as square tubing, mesh screen, flat bar, lockboxes, and ornamental scrollwork.

By combining the visual language of the Virgin Mary with the structure of a traditional security door, the piece examines the contradictions between protection and confinement, faith and control, comfort and surveillance.

The work reflects on how religion and domestic space can function simultaneously as places of safety and systems of emotional restriction, particularly for women within patriarchal households.

Rather than transforming the object into sculpture through abstraction alone, I remain faithful to the actual construction methods and materials used in working-class security fabrication. The piece exists between devotional object, household barrier, and social document.