Australian poet and librettist Patricia Sykes spent her 2006 residency at Rimbun Dahan working on the libretto for a full-length opera, The Navigator, a collaborative work with composer Liza Lim. Sykes travelled through Malaysia and to Cambodia’s Angkor Wat researching culture and society in order to enrich her libretto and develop the theatrical aspects of the opera. Sykes is the author of two poetry collections and has edited four books of poetry. Her work focuses strongly on the interactions between people and their contexts and her residency helped explore how a host culture nurtures itself, its people and the environment.
I spent last weekend at the trustees’ retreat for WWF Malaysia in the rainforest of Belum. Despite many hours spent in meetings, we managed some brief expeditions into the jungle. The Lantern Bug, pictured right, was spotted during one such walk.
Lantern bug seen during a walk in Belum rainforest.
The elaborately patterned Lantern Bug (Fulgora spinolae) uses its strange elongated forehead as a sense organ and for balance. It is one of a small group of brightly coloured insects, the lantern bugs, that are particularly diverse in the Belum-Temengor rainforest.
A few days after my return from Belum, on the morning of 17 August, a large python was found stuck in the well at Rimbun Dahan. On placing an escape route of a wooden stake in the well, the snake had escaped by the afternoon. Just goes to show that to see some large wildlife, you don’t have to be in the jungle!
“Reticulated python, Python reticulatus, the longest of all snakes, attains a maximum length of between 10 and 15 m. Its normal prey consists of warm blooded animals from chickens, pigs, goats and monkeys to small deer which it can subdue. The prey is swallowed whole; the snakes’ jaws are not rigidly joined and thus can be stretched wide to accommodate bulky food items. Normally found in the jungle, especially close to water, also in rural and urban settlements. Small pythons can easily be captured and tamed, but adults are dangerous as they can deliver vicious bites, and their powerful coils may be too much for a man to handle. The female python lays from 20 to 50 eggs, rarely up to 100. The eggs adhere together in a mass, which the female coils around and incubates for a period of between 75 and 90 days. Baby pythons look similar to adults and measure about 60 cm in length.”
— Fascinating Snakes of Southeast Asia – An Introduction, by Francis Lim Leong Keng and Monty Lee Tat-Mong.
Above: A view of the Temengor rainforest, courtesy of KH Khoo and the Malaysian Nature Society.
Recently there was news that the Gola rainforest, an important biodiversity site in Sierra Leone, in Africa, was to be set aside for conservation, and logging was to stop. His Excellency Alhaji Dr Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, President of Sierra Leone, commented: “This is a new approach in forest protection that will address not only the protection of the forest and its biodiversity, but will also provide sustainable benefit to the local community in perpetuity.”
And why would this be of interest to Malaysian readers?
Sierra Leone is ranked 170 in the World Bank’s list of 179 nations, with a GDP of just $903 per capita. Malaysia is ranked 61, with a GDP per person of $11,201. There is obviously a huge difference between the two, and yet a nation as poor and troubled as Sierra Leone is can still see the importance of protecting its forests.
Malaysia, despite its development, is still logging critically important biodiversity hotspots, in particular the Temengor Forest Reserve just south of the East West Highway. This is one of the last bastions of virgin forest, home to tigers, elephants, gaur, seladang, leopards and our almost extinct Sumatran rhinoceros, that is large enough to provide sufficient space for these animals when combined with Belum to the north and the Hala Bala sanctuary across the border in Thailand.
Temengor presents our last chance to protect a sufficiently large swath of landscape scale forest that is 130 million years old, older than the Congo and older than the Amazon, and therefore much more complex in its biodiversity. We cannot pin all our hopes on Taman Negara as the only reserve for our biodiversity, especially as the forests of the north harbour different species, particularly in the plant kingdom. The Federal Government’s National Physical Plan recognizes the importance of Temengor as a protector of soils, water, biodiversity and our landscape, but state politicians hold the key to the future of our forests, not the federal government.
The Perak Integrated Timber Complex (PITC), the only timber company in peninsula Malaysia to have been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) recently had its certification suspended, meaning that it no longer meets international standards for sustainable logging. PITC operates, along with other concession holders, in the Temengor Forest Reserve, extracting the big trees that anchor the structure of the forest.
The state government of Perak says that the logging must go ahead to support the state’s timber industry that employs 9,000 people; but there are also approximately 10,000 Orang Asli living in the area who depend on the same forest reserve for their livelihood.
The forest is worth far more as an intact organism, than if it is turned into tables and doors. Malaysia has developed at a massive rate in recent years, and now it is time to consider our priorities, and protect what we have left rather than see it damaged, perhaps irreparably, for the sake of keeping the timber industry in business. They should, in an ideal world, be employed instead in restoring the landscapes that they have worked over, so that our already logged forest reserves can be harvested profitably in the future.
If we don’t protect our irreplaceable natural assets we may face the ironic situation in which Sierra Leone’s drive for sustainable development may be more successful than ours.
A new camera with a zoom lens brings us Rimbun Dahan’s very own peanut gallery – a selection of intimate portraits of the local troupe of leaf monkeys.
Dusky or Spectacled Leaf Monkey Cengkong, lotong bercelak Trachypithecus obscurus or Presbytis obscura.
Burma and Thailand to Malaya, widespread in forest at all elevations. Coloration is rather variable, most individuals have back and shoulders grey or dark grey, legs and the crest of longhairs on top of the head paler grey, the breast and belly usually appear pale grey or whitish, with a sharp line of demarcation between this shade and the darker back. Distinguishing feature on adults is the bold white interrupted rings around the eyes and a white patch over the mouth, including both lips. In new-born young the fur is pale orange or reddish buff, and the skin of the face entirely pink.
Arboreal in groups of 5 to 20 (the group at Rimbun Dahan is estimated at about 12 adults). Home range of a group is 5 to 17 hectares. When traveling troops usually move in extended line, each monkey following the same general route through the treetops running quadripedally along branches, climbing creepers, or leaping from one tree across to the canopy of the next.
At rest, the long tail hangs straight down and is often conspicuous when the monkeys’s body is hidden. In motion the tail although not prehensile is important in maintaining balance. Natural diet consists of young leaves and shoots; these may be plucked by hand (see image of mother with clasped fist holding leaf), but more often the monkey pulls down leafy branches and browses directly on the terminal shoots (hence the defoliation of the assam gelugor trees at Rimbun Dahan). Oestrus every three weeks, gestation 20 weeks.
The Wild Mammals of Malaya and Singapore,
by Lord Medway, Oxford University Press, 1969.
Tim Craker in his studio room at Hotel Penaga, Penang, with ‘Beyond the Pail’.
Australian artist Tim Craker undertook a 3-month residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2006. In July 2011, he returned to Malaysia to take up the first artist’s residency at Hotel Penaga in George Town, Penang. During the residency he created the installation sculpture Beyond the Pail, now on display in front of the main hotel entrance.
Beyond the Pail, plastic buckets & cable ties, ca. 160cm diameter, 2011.
Artist’s statement:
Beyond the Pail is an assemblage of twelve ten-gallon yellow translucent plastic buckets, suspended in space and able to rotate about its vertical axis. The works’s construction is based on the dodecahedron, one of the five Platonic solids, each side of which is a pentagon.
The work stems from a fascination with both the everyday object, released from its usual purpose, and the possibilities of combination that it may offer. The bucket, in this case, is no longer a functional object, but becomes an element of a larger construction that refers to the basic geometry of the natural world – the underlying patterns that are both decorative and seminal – the perfection of which is alleviated by the random positioning of the buckets’ handles.
Suspended and rotating gently in passing breezes, Beyond the Pail provides gentle subversion of quotidian functionality, while making visual reference to – amongst other things – viral particles, Buckminster-Fuller’s geodesic domes (a local example of which is situated adjacent to the Komtar tower here in Georgetown), pollen grains and spaceships.
Beyond the pail, certainly! Beyond the pale, I hope not.
Tim Craker
July 2011
Right: ‘Botanical Data File #3’. Plastic safety fencing, hand-cut. 205 x 300 cm. 2008. Now in the permanent collection at Rimbun Dahan.
In 2008, Tim’s joint exhibition dot-net-dot-au (with Louise Saxton) toured to Malaysia and Singapore, including works he had conceived at Rimbun Dahan.
Artists’ Statement from the Travelling Exhibition dot-net-dot-au, 2008
In 2006 I was very fortunate to spend three months in Malaysia as a full-time artist. The residency – at Rimbun Dahan, a private estate on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur – was a fantastic and intense period of sensory stimulation, reflection, artistic exploration and creative production, in a luxurious and supportive environment. This series of work stems from that time.
My overwhelming impression of Malaysia – gathered from many previous visits, as well as my residency – was primarily pattern, both natural and man-made. From the tiling of Kuala Lumpur pavements to the lattice of tropical vegetation against the sky, my eye was taken by the prevalence and variety of pattern – botanical, Islamic and industrial.
Pattern is by definition repeated units, and a pattern is discerned through identification of these units, their repetition and interrelationship. Patterns can be merely decorative – children make patterns with seashells at the beach, for example – but we also talk of seeing a pattern, when we discern a connection between disparate objects or events, which hints at a meaning behind them.
One stimulus for the work is a fascination with pattern and how it “works”; another is the excitement of generating substantial pieces from myriad small, unregarded and everyday objects and things.
Several months ago I read in one of the weekend newspaper magazines a regular article about someone’s “favourite things”. This particular week one of the objects was a small length of an enormously long daisy chain, made as an entry in a sculpture competition by the person’s nine-year-old daughter, Lola. Part of Lola’s artist’s statement was: “I like daisy chains because you start with something little and end with something big.” I tore the page out, took it to my studio and stuck Lola’s quotation in my journal.
The materials themselves – objects by which we are surrounded but of which we rarely take notice – are also a stimulus, coupled with a desire to transform or release them from their expected role.
What if a plastic spoon is released from mere function and becomes part of a huge cargo net, screen or trap, for example? A single disposable plastic cup is just a plastic cup; hundreds of cups tied together become something else altogether, and many things at the same time. Dull practicality cedes to other ways of using objects, subverting or ignoring their actual purpose – less serious, unpredictable, more interesting….
Above: detail of ‘Thought Pattern’, plastic chinese soup spoons, nylon thread. 250 x 400cm. 2007
Plastic disposable materials have been chosen not only for their “transformative potential”, but because they are cheap (nine hundred plastic cups are still affordable, for example!), readily available, light, durable and easily worked. Safety fencing is also a cheap and abundant material – what excitement to buy fifty metres of it! The materials one uses carry a whole set of meanings, though, which are part – even if on a subconscious level – of why they are chosen and the meanings the work may suggest.
In Malaysia during my 2006 residency, I was invited to be part of an exhibition entitled “Feed Me!”. The curatorial theme was an exploration of food and its cultural and social significance. I thought of the role that a common interest in food – recipes, ritual, preparation, eating – has played (and continues to play) in the successful meeting of my family with my Malaysian partner and his family. I considered, on a broader scale, the importance of food – in all its various manifestations – in intercultural relations. Food is sustenance, embodies tradition, and demonstrates familial love and care. It also epitomises cultural difference – while offering the means of transcending it…
Food utensils have been objects and subjects I have often returned to – I realise, in retrospect – in my work. Aside from the tactile attractions of the immediately-recognisable and particular shapes, maybe what I return to is the symbolic representation of order, of ritual, of “civilised” ingestion, of the set table, of sitting down to dinner and conversations over a meal – and what that might stand against.
The materials are plastic and non-degradable – symptomatic of a throw-away society. They have little aesthetic value – their design criteria value low cost first, then functionality. They are disposable and “single-use”, yet fill kitchen cupboards, builders’ skips and landfill everywhere. They are the products of a petrochemical industry itself responsible for vast environmental damage – in accessing raw materials, in the by- products of manufacture and in the consumption of the end-product hydrocarbon fuels.
In a gentle subversion of the dictates of hyper-consumerism, the worthless, “unfriendly” and disposable is assembled in these works on a monumental scale, and invested with new aesthetic worth: the mundane is transformed, the banal subverted. Myriad units are assembled together; grids are formed piece by piece according to certain rules; lattices of both two and three dimensions are captured or created. The construction process becomes meditative – repeated actions of drilling, placing, threading, knotting or trimming are performed, but create an unpredicted and organic result, a molecular array, a crystalline lattice. The grid is also approached from the opposite direction: units of a “found” plastic lattice are selectively deleted to reveal a leaf shape in outline, a botanical silhouette – the plastic scoop removes the fallen leaf from the swimming pool. The contrast between medium and message is between the un-aesthetic, unregarded industrial fencing, used for protection, exclusion and visibility, and the living natural biodegradable leaf, between one pattern and another, between design and evolution. Offcuts, like dead leaves, fall below the screens.
What information might a pattern contain, and how is it encoded?
Does the botanical information always lie within the plastic screen?
Is the screen something we see through, or something that prevents our access?
Patterns are perfect, geometric and regular. More fascinating, however, is the disruption of the pattern: the net sags, stretches and folds; segments of the pattern are excised; the repetition is imperfect; the regular structure is deformed. The perfect geometry of a spiderweb only becomes useful when a fly has infringed its meticulous structure. [Alan Fletcher, “The Art of Looking Sideways”, Phaidon Press 2001]. Pristine rigidity morphs into organic imperfection; patterns and their shadows superimpose in Moire interference: perfection is both an illusion and much less interesting than reality.
At what point does a disrupted pattern become mere chaos?
When do patterns within patterns become too complex to apprehend?
My work in dot-net-dot-au refers to – amongst other things – genetic codes and their transcription errors, to cellular arrays and honeycomb, to the computer-drawing of three-dimensional objects and surfaces, to molecular models. It subverts the original use for everyday objects and materials, and in a gentle way addresses issues of biodegradability and permanence, of the culture of the disposable, of our cultural culinary appetites and of the occident and the orient. The motivation for the work is intuitive rather than primarily conceptual. The works arise from a response to materials, and from a desire – shared with Lola – to make something big out of something little, something valuable out of something worthless, something you want to keep from something you throw away.
Tim Craker
April 2008
Photography for dot-net-dot-au, except profile image of Tim, by Andrew Wuttke & Gavin Hansford.
Above: Guests exploring Tim Craker’s studio
Above: Tim Craker’s open studio at Rimbun Dahan during his first residency in 2006.
Louise Saxton is a Melbourne-based artist who trained in painting and printmaking at RMIT and holds a Post-graduate Diploma with the Victorian College of the Arts and a Masters Degree in Fine Arts with the University of Ballarat.
Since 2000, Louise’s practice has centred on the reconstruction of detritus from the home. This has included the re-use of her own paintings, collections of everyday business envelopes and vintage wallpapers and discarded needlework.
In 2006 she was awarded a Sir Ian Potter Cultural Trust travel grant to undertake an artist residency at Rimbun Dahan in Malaysia. In 2008, her joint exhibition dot-net-dot-au (with Tim Craker) toured to Malaysia and Singapore, including works she had conceived and created at Rimbun Dahan.
Star Flower, cotton and linen embroidery, steel pins on nylon bridal tulle, 300 x 180cm approx, 2008. Now in the permanent collection at Rimbun Dahan.
Above: Detail of A bird in the hand #1, cotton and linen embroidery, steel pins on nylon bridal tulle. 300 x 150cm approx. 2008.
Above: Detail of Re-Collection: arachnida bellis perennis – daisy spider, cotton embroidery, silk, steel pins on nylon bridal tulle, approx 300 x 240cm, 2007.
Above: Detail of Star Flower, cotton and linen embroidery, steel pins on nylon bridal tulle, 300 x 180cm approx, 2008. Now in the permanent collection at Rimbun Dahan.
Artists’ Statement from the Travelling Exhibition dot-net-dot-au
Based on a collection of small henna-hand stencils (mehndi) I found in KL in 2006, I made (the linen coloured) Hand-work first. I chose the hornbill as the negative motif inside the hand because, being a vulnerable species in Malaysia, I wanted to create a connecting point between Malaysia, my time at Rimbun Dahan (the image was found in a Malaysian Nature Society magazine on the property) and our two very different cultures. I liked it so much that I made the blue one, mirroring the hand and repeating the hornbill negative within it. The Home-Tree was made next (based on an Indian Tree of Life image that I’ve been carrying around with me for the past 15 years) and the koala was chosen as the negative motif. Being a vulnerable species here at home, the koala acts for me, as an Australian counterpart to the Malaysian hornbill. The koala also has a deep connection, within Australia, to the decorative home-based traditions of the past (“Australiana” doilies etc) and as a national icon.
The use of the negative motif inside the highly decorative outer motif becomes a metaphor of vulnerability and potential loss (of species and also traditions) which is common to both our cultures. So, the choices I’ve made here are about my trying to find connecting points between my brief encounters with South East Asia and my ongoing life in Australia.
The majority of motifs I am choosing for dot-net-dot-au were “collected” in Asia and the majority of actual embroidered materials were collected here in Australia. These, largely Western motifs (dotted throughout with Asian inspired imagery) could be seen to represent colonisation, but hopefully, they can also create another link between cultures – that of the home and the garden.
In-filled with hundreds of, individually extracted, embroidered motifs, the Hand-work pieces create, because the palms are opened outwards, a gesture of welcome and offering (which links them to the original henna (mehndi) hands used for Indian weddings and other celebrations). In both Hand-works and Home-Tree there is also a sense of protection, by holding the vulnerable, absent image within their palm or branches. There is perhaps also, the possibility of loss and at the same time, the potential for ‘salvage’.
The other image I have chosen to work with is the Buddha head, also brought home with me from Malaysia as a simple pencil line-drawing. Traced from a book I found in my guest room at Rimbun Dahan, the original sculpture housed in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, is a 7th Century Cambodian Buddha. Imitations of these ancient sculptures are found here in Australia, one being spotted recently sitting outside my local garden shop. The image represents my own fascination with the incredible beauty of Eastern arts traditions, but also the difficult arena of the displacement of traditions, of Colonisation and the plundering of other cultures. At the same time, there seems to exist in the image, an enduring sense of quiet, humility and peace, which allows the image to somehow transcend its appropriation – or does it? The Buddha’s cast-down eyes, in my re-appropriation, are made of pearl-drop lace, a feather and a blue flower. His ear and cheek are embellished with tiny blue birds and a miniature Chinese fishing boat, a delicate butterfly caresses his neck and in his hair knots, (made from over 100 circular crochet and embroidered motifs) ‘nest’ two running-stitched swallows. These embellishments on an image once cast in bronze, and now drawn by me in delicate reclaimed lace, could point to the Buddhist idea of transience? However, it also makes me feel uncomfortable – is it still a “stolen” image? This also causes me to wonder, about the nature of travel, of my residency and my return to Malaysia and Singapore to exhibit this year – while we try to grasp something of the wisdom and experience of other traditions, can we ever really hold on to it, or make it our own?
Helen Bodycomb of Castlemaine, Australia, had a residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2006. She returned to Malaysia in 2009 with three other mosaic artists to work on the collaborative artwork ‘The Shyness of Trees’ at Hotel Penaga.
Bio
Helen Bodycomb moved to the Castlemaine area in late 2007 from Melbourne, where she had lived on and off for almost 30 years. Born in Adelaide and raised as a young child in Elizabeth (SA), she went to Uni High and later – to art school – in Melbourne. She completed a BA in Fine Art (majoring in Painting) at Victoria College, Prahran and then a Post-Graduate Diploma at Monash Uni. See http://www.helenbodycomb.com/
The last month has been stormy at Rimbun Dahan, with rain almost every day.
This Stink Horn fungus was found mid March under a clump of palms. A
saprophytic (parasitic) fungus, it emits an odour that attracts flies that
visit the messy decaying flesh, subsequently helping to disperse the spores.
BY ANGELA HIJJAS