In August 2024, Filipina visual artist Noelle Varela spent one month in residency at Rimbun Dahan.
About the Artist
Noelle Varela (b. 1993) is a Filipina visual artist who studied and earned her degree in Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines- Diliman. She mainly works with three-dimensional pieces and continuously constructs contemporary images using sawdust through flora and female imagery to depict female and women experiences, sensuality and societal standings.
https://www.instagram.com/varelanoelle
About the Residency
Continuing my exploration around sawdust as textile during my residency, I delved into a more narrative imagery about finding familiarity — similar and the same, within a new environment to cope with the sense of place. There is a challenge for me to expand and allow myself to experience new places, to have myself familiarize and notice similarities between my home back in the Philippines and here in Malaysia has encouraged me to attain a sense of ease.
To establish one as ‘usual’, we ought to progressively obtain familiarity with the environment through routines, finding similarities and by building practical inhabitation around our surroundings. We tend to gravitate towards things and experiences that seem familiar to us, something we had experienced and played into beforehand to which our repetitive encounter with the unknown becomes familiar. There is a hand-in-hand relationship between our personal experiences and daily routines to the place itself. Our cognitive aligns with our intimate perception of reality — to be able to distinguish similar against ‘the same’ happenings. Activities revolving the practical use of the place and landscape afforded a sense of ease and belongingness.
For the Open Day, I will be showing a series of sawdust work and drawings in which both portray places and objects I interact with daily here in Rimbun Dahan. These images range from the path to and from my studio space and home, depictions of the daily routines I continued and imposed during my stay, familiar plants, interactions with the pets and areas in the house I inhabit with my usual doings. Places are experienced, new landscapes develop to “normal experiences” processed by the body and its senses.
