A private arboretum & arts centre in Malaysia
At the end of their four month residency in May 2017, Haffendi Anuar and Veronika Neukirch briefly displayed their individual works and collaborative work in the airwell of our underground gallery. The play of different materials, dimensions, and angles made for a very interesting, short-lived installation. Photos courtesy of the artists.
Rimbun Dahan presents Everlasting Love, a showcase of recent works made by Malaysian artist Azliza Ayob who, in her 16 year career, has worked in many mediums such as collage, painting, sculpture, and installation. She has spent her year in residency exploring the possibilities of creating art from discarded and unwanted daily items to sustain and survive in the field that she loves most, which is making art. The exhibition also ties together the themes of labour, community, tradition, and sustainability.
DATES: 27 November – 4 December 2016
OPENING HOURS: Weekends 10am – 6pm, Monday to Friday by appointment
Admission is FREE. For the event page on Facebook please click here.
There will also be a free guided tour of Rimbun Dahan’s grounds and traditional village houses at 9am on 27 November, conducted by Angela Hijjas. Our other current resident artist, Si Jie Loo, will also be having an open studio 10am to 6pm on Sunday, 27 November.
Nature plays a strong part in her work and like many previous Rimbun Dahan resident artists, Azliza took inspiration from the surrounding grounds and the various types of flora and fauna growing in the gardens, using her time cleaning the lawns in front of her cottage to understand different types of leaves. In that process, she also got acquainted with the inorganic things accumulating (and “growing”) within the grounds as well as in the surrounding village. Azliza started out with one studio and a small collection of plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET). One year on, the scale of her work has required her to utilize two studios to house pieces made from an estimated 2000 PET bottles and other materials. The bottles were either handpicked from the roadside and the trash or donated by fellow artists, friends, family, and eateries and shops from Kuang all the way to Kuantan.
“I am fascinated with the transparency of PET bottles,” says Azliza. “I’m fascinated by its longevity and how it’s so easily accumulated to the point where it is ‘haunting’. [Through working with the material], I became more sculptural. The process is so tedious, but the result is satisfying.”
Azliza learned various traditional crafting techniques from a young age and put this knowledge to use to both figuratively and literally weave together her unconventional and modern materials into softer forms, organic shapes, and detailed sculptures and collages. She has used plastic bottles in an interactive site-specific installation titled For Our Daughters (2011), glitter to fill thousands of mushroom forms and pink rain drops for her residency exhibition at Fukuoka Art Museum in 2012, and paper collages in her 2014 solo at Wei-ling Gallery, All That Glitters. New materials joined her repertoire in making work for Everlasting Love.
“I made weavings by substituting plastic strips, wires and wire mesh for traditional mengkuang, I incorporated glass and plastic beads, rhinestones, oil paints mixed with spray paints, recycled printed items, glitters, stuff from local hardware stores and all-in-one convenience shops. The materials [I use] must be considered trash, unwanted, or too ordinary and unimaginable to create art, it must show the laborious process of art.” She supplements these with the inclusion of a more sentimental material – batik cloths from her own personal collection, mostly wedding presents from her mother-in-law’s Kelantanese family. Ordinary perhaps, but certainly not trash or unwanted. “These batik cloths have gone through and withstood the vigorous activity of a mother, wife, artist, and best preserved in art.”
The use of everyday materials was both a matter of principle and necessity. Azliza says, “I find being creative is somehow connected with being frugal. Working with limited finances is possible with good interpersonal skills and when you work together in a supportive community. In this way, I think of creating art as a way to empower our economy, to live cleaner and greener, to help us think of sustenance and sustainability as a way to maintain our freedom (to love, to be, to do).”
Rimbun Dahan is also a proud participant of Gallery Weekend Kuala Lumpur, a festival tour of the rich and innovative arts and culture scene of the city happening 25 – 27 November 2016.
Rimbun Dahan presents Priceless, showcasing works made by ceramic artist Al-khuzairie Ali during his six-month residency from July to December 2015, where he explored the concept of human connection to the external world (an ongoing focus in his work) through the subject of animals. The external world overflows in Rimbun Dahan, a green lung home to a variety of wildlife, tucked away from the bustle of the city. Within the grounds humans, animals and plants alike live under a canopy of branches, leaves and steel beams, providing fruitful intersections of the organic and the constructed. This setting provided the perfect incubator for the artist and his explorations.
Khuzairie hails from Pahang, home of the largest portion of Taman Negara, one of the oldest rainforests in the world. This sense of place informs his connection and exploration of the natural world time and again – from his studio in Puncak Alam he began to think of what used to be lush, thick jungle disappearing under development and construction, habitat disappearing under greed. “I look at the hideous side of the human character which has an impact on other beings in the ecosystem,” says Khuzairie of his inspiration. “We know that some animals are threatened with extinction but the modern world focuses on the importance of money and this has many people losing their judgment and ignoring the nature of life.”
We invite you to visit the exhibition and experience Al-Khuzairie’s work as well as the surroundings that made the work possible.
OPENING HOURS:
Weekends 10am – 6pm, Monday to Friday by appointment
16 – 24 January 2016
Admission is FREE.
Rimbun Dahan is also hosting our annual dance event, Dancing in Place, a series of site-specific contemporary dance performances by dancers from all over Asia, on 16 and 17 January.
There will be a guided tour of Rimbun Dahan’s grounds and traditional village houses at 9am on Sunday 24 January, conducted by Angela Hijjas. For the event page on Facebook please click here.
In 2012, Malaysian artist Azam Aris (also known as Helmi Azam B. Tajol Aris) underwent a year-long residency at Rimbun Dahan, working both on paintings and three-dimensional work. On August 5 2015, his solo exhibition YEAH opened at HOM Art Trans and was officiated by Angela Hijjas. The text of her speech is below.
Thanks to HoM for the invitation to speak tonight at the opening of Azam Aris’ new works. I would like to take the opportunity, first of all, to express my appreciation for all that HoM, the House of MataHati, has done over the years in supporting young artists by giving them an opportunity to mix with a broad range of people and influences, and to explore new ideas in a very supportive environment.
I first met Azam when he participated in our Art for Nature exhibitions, where his quirky clocks were always a huge hit with visitors and collectors. He used battery operated clock hands to animate his figures in weird and wonderful ways.
I got to know Azam a little better when he was a resident artist at Rimbun Dahan in 2012, and became very familiar with the works he made at that time. His show at Rimbun Dahan was a great success and he contributed significantly towards our programme. I’m sure too he benefited from the joint experience he shared with the Australian artist, Jonathan Nichols, with whom he staged an exhibition with us in early 2013.
The current works on display tonight are a surprisingly intense distillation of that past practice in which he explored the supernatural and the extra terrestrial, with a cunning insight into Malay culture and its superstitions and our quite natural fear of the unknown.
The figures in this new body of work have completely lost the individual quirkiness of his earlier works, and are repeated to such an extent that one is forced to look very carefully to search for what Azam is trying to say: individuality and personality are squeezed out by the sheer force of numbers, and the density of his compositions is relieved only by the lightest of variations… could all this be a reflection of the current atmosphere in our beloved Tanah Air? Who are these people and where are all these figures going? How indeed are they going to move with the fluidity of his mechanical hands, arousing the magic of the bomoh and the waving of a magic kris? A few individuals in the mass manage to wave in desperation or jubilation, like drowning victims or audience members at a rock concert, but they retain the look of the ultimate selfie…. Repeat repeat repeat, losing their individuality at the expense of the instant gratification of a self styled and posed photo of how we want the world to see us… but unfortunately no one is looking, no one is going to see one small figure and find it remarkable, only in the massing is there something remarkable that has an energy that a single figure cannot accomplish.
I can’t help but infer some political message in these massed figures: here we are, all crammed together, lacking any capacity to make decisions and shape our own destiny, wandering like a herd, waiting for a leader to organize us into a rational and responsible machine. The energy and numbers are there but is it fear of the unknown that makes us reluctant to take the next step? In a society that has known nothing else for over half a century it is always hard to see a different way ahead, but there is indeed a different road, and I hope that Azam’s figures work it out soon!
I doubt if I spoke to Azam about this he would say that he had any political agenda with these works, but in the light of these dark times it is hard to ignore. He has looked at the dark side before in his Republic Sulap works, where mad scientists manipulated weird machines against a backdrop of outer space, and Malay bomohs looked blindly on creation while mouthing unintelligible incantations; but with these works tonight I wonder if I am looking at some insoluble image that I have to stare at until it coalesces into an understanding that once made can never be forgotten, and inevitably the thought occurs to me that with today’s preoccupations with corruption at the very core and at every level of our society perhaps we are all complicit, every single self that is replicated repeatedly… we have stood aside for so long that we no longer have any capacity to act. I certainly hope that this isn’t the case.
The enormous changes that the Malays particularly have had to cope with in the last 40 years have not been strong on cultural and political development. Instead the changes that were wrought by education and urbanization, by leaving life in the kampong and substituting it with life in a condo have proved to be a little empty. Pursuing the dream of comfort, convenience and security in the modern world is not an end in itself, we still need a sense of purpose; and then technology stepped in with another promise: use your iPhone and experience the world, be a part of everything, in effect be a cog in the elaborate plot of buying and consuming the latest technology; but in the end it will not change your life at all. To do that we still need our individuality and our own powers to think and act.
We have the magic of instant communication at every moment to every corner of the world, our selfies plaster our self-awareness with a sense of accomplishment that is no more real than the bomoh’s incantations. We have been hoodwinked into thinking that we have an intrinsic importance that repeated images surely validate: but communication should be a means to an end, not an end in itself, and I think these works are a poignant reminder that we are in danger of being hoodwinked ourselves.
Thank you, Azam, for these works, and for inviting me this evening, and I hope this show will give all of us the impetus to be more than just a cog in a machine.
Angela Hijjas, August 5 2015
Rimbun Dahan presents Bricolage, a selection of works by our current resident artists from various countries in South East Asia and Asia Pacific. The exhibition combines works of varying mediums as well as varying viewpoints, showcasing the differentiated results of the artists’ time spent working and living in Rimbun Dahan.
The artists featured are: Malaysian sculptor Anniketyni Madian, Australian artist Jennifer Tyers, Indonesian poet Khairani Barokka, Vietnamese painter and sculptor Tran Dan, and Thai painter Yuwatee Jehko.
Weekends 10am – 6pm, Monday to Friday by appointment
15 – 22 March 2015
Km 27 (entrance before Lorong Belimbing), Jalan Kuang 48050 Kuang, Selangor
Entry: Free
At 9am on Sunday 22nd March 2015, there will also be a guided tour of the Rimbun Dahan gardens and traditional houses by Angela Hijjas.
For further inquiries about the exhibition or the artists you can contact Syar, Arts Manager, at syar@rimbundahan.org.
For more information on the artists visit:
The exhibition Rimbun Dahan – Cultivating the Garden features the work of Australian artists who have been beneficiaries of the residency programs in Malaysia, and acknowledges and celebrates the contribution that the experience has made to their creative lives. Cross cultural pollination at its finest.
ARTISTS:
28 August – 19 September 2013
Light Square Gallery, Adelaide College of the Arts, 39 Light Square, Adelaide
Monday – Friday, 9am – 5pm
Presented by Adelaide Festival Centre, John Foubister and Melanie Fulton.
“In a new and exotic environment there is a lot to look at, but what was I looking for?”
This diary entry of Cathy Brooks (2009) described the question faced by all residents as they arrive at Kuala Lumpur’s international airport filled with anticipation, hope, and vague thoughts of what might await. It is the answer they carry on their return, however, that best captures the ethos of Rimbun Dahan. It is a door swung wide to a raft of new questions, intrigues that continue to surface long after the journey. It is what pulls this group of artists back, through their memories, their work, and their persistent journeys north. Simply, ‘something’ was answered for each of them, be it ‘jamming with an anonymous maker through found objects’ as Tony Twigg described, or Mike Ladd falling in sync with the rhythms of pantuns, those poetic couplets that seemingly penetrate to the soul. The pulse of this residency continues to be felt.
The climate of artist residencies has changed greatly since 1994, when Adelaide artist John Foubister was the first to sign on for a year ‘in the garden’. The frequency of movement and the networks brokered by artists today – especially in this region, which has become blatantly aware of its global currency under the banner of contemporary Asian art – are highly sophisticated, expected, and somewhat viral in reach. While Rimbun Dahan has also expanded during that time, its programming more ambitious, diverse, and exponentially larger, there is one thing that remains unique to Rimbun Dahan and that is its gift of time; its stillness in all this push.
Brooks’ diary described a “looking for things to hang something on to.” Assuming the habit of bowerbirds, each artist in turn collected fragments of this new place in a ritualistic practice of nesting or courtship; patterns, objects and conversations picked over, arranged, and accumulated as a summation of self there. Rimbun provided that rare space to distill this cache of stimuli, filtered at the pace of kampong life. One is not competing with institutionally driven outcomes, bright lights, or history’s overwhelming footprint on a city, like many international residencies that seemingly insert the artist into ‘the role’ like a cut-out, only to be superseded by the next edition. “What am I looking for?” is a question answered on very individual terms.
The eight artists in this exhibition made that journey across time: John Foubister (1994 & 2011), Tony Twigg (2005), Cathy Brooks (2009), Mike Ladd (2009), Jessica B. Watson (2010), Melanie Fulton (2011), Rob Gutteridge (2011), and Jumaadi (2012). Their work is diverse and, yet, their cues are surprisingly similar. Both Brooks and Twigg collected detritus along Jalan Kuang, the street that runs as an artery through Kampong Plong to the Komuter train’s distant outpost. Twigg explained, “A lot of time was spent looking for a mark that comes from here, that is Malaysia not just KL. It turned out that mark for me was the fish box found beside a pasaraya. I started working with the ‘physical’ line of the object rather than its inspiration. I found the subtle and random shifts in colour and texture of the timber aesthetically moving, so I began using thinner and thinner paint until I had the courage to use none.”
Similarly, Brooks gathered neighborhood detritus that echoed patterning in Muslim architecture and script, traditional fabric design and natural forms, fragments that became a pseudo script or alphabet. She chose “to build a language from the ground up, words straight from the street, and make meaning for myself out of it. How do you read these found ‘symbols’ if you don’t know which way up they read?” Rather than being lost in translation they assume a meaning as form. Separated from their original context they take on the vernacular of art, assemblage, and installation. It is an age-old tradition of storytelling with a contemporary inflection.
Australian-based Indonesian artist Jumaadi continued that dialogue but pushed its implication a step further. Known as a contemporary story-maker, his wall drawing made from cardboard supermarket boxes not only speaks of package goods moved between places – a metaphor for the peripatetic artist today – but acts as a frame for ‘his story’ as a cross-cultural artist. Simply, the site that the work is specific to is in fact Jumaadi’s own story – not Adelaide, not Moscow, or Penang.
Storytelling is so ingrained in him that, as viewers, we walk into that narrative and are transported. Locals in Penang had a similar experience during Jumaadi’s stay at Hotel Penaga (2012). Adding a twist to the wayang kulit, the shadow puppet tradition associated with the Malay culture, Jumaadi turned to a Chinese folk tale and performed it in Chinese. That arrival at something entirely new, yet carrying the resonance of familiarity, underscores the potency of the residency experience and its ability to cut through observations and allow a cross flow across otherwise segmented territory.
Mike Ladd found it also. His series Book of Hours (2009) produced during his residency, explored ideas of layering, consciously, subconsciously, and sensorially. Staying in Rumah Uda Manap, a Malay kampong house decorated with Chinese fretwork and skirting the east boundary of the estate, Ladd described the stereophonic broadcast of maghrib (evening prayer) from three local mosques, overlapping and fusing into a singular, and momentary, cohesion. It was an aural imprint of this place shared by Brooks, Twigg and Watson. Watson further blended experience, architecture and histories through rubbings taken from the house. Time was both a meter for the minutiae of now and a sense of an all-encompassing timelessness.
Ladd set himself the task of writing a pantun a day; four iambic lines that paired observations of nature with introspective musings on human relationships, their ulterior motive to find maksud, purpose or connection. He added, “They are small poems, but risky.” It is this embrace of risk that is key here, not only for an artist to pack up from work and home for a year, but the inherent risk in confronting their own creativity.
It is reiterated by Rob Gutteridge, who stepped outside his academic life in Adelaide to immerse himself in this pungent, saturated landscape. His first impressions described, “…a pale milky wash over the landscape, softening the contrasts and bringing distant colours closer together.” It was the antithesis of Australia, but in a strange way nature softened the blow. He added, “If one is alert, the ambient has a character, providing a starting point and a foundation.”
Gutteridge’s found his language in clouds, billowing and morphing as a ready metaphor for the human condition, described as ‘environmental portraiture’. Reflecting on what connects rather than divides, Gutteridge asked, “What is the threshold of recognition?” He continued, “I have become interested in what constitutes the conditions for visual suggestion, or resemblance.” It is a view particularly shared by Brooks’ pictograms and this new sculpture by Twigg constructed from shipping palettes.
Jumaadi pondered similar questions of nature as Gutteridge and Foubister. Inspired by early evenings spent at the jetty, near the ferry crossing from Penang to Butterworth, he produced a body of small paintings. He recalls, “The sea and sky often merged into a mist. This mist created by so many colours reminded me of the paintings of Caravaggio and Rothko, stories hidden in the drama of flickering light and lyrical ambience.”
Is it alchemy? Foubister’s residency paintings described a vivid internal world of swirling pools, atmospheric perforations, and dark organic abstractions. He described, “In 1994 I was preoccupied with the existence of the infinite, and in response wanted to make images that were a celebration of doubt as a virtue. The ideas were broad and inclusive and I wasn’t seeking local influence or engagement. But it occurred mostly by osmosis.”
They were, as are his new gestural landscapes, about finding his own landscape. I see in them a conversation with Ken Whisson and William Robinson’s creation paintings, the sheer physicality of the landscape, its emotional and territorial navigation. To quote Robinson, “There are things all around you and you are in it. Everything is constantly moving…We don’t really have an orientation in this infinity.” [1]
Melanie Fulton sought to anchor that engagement. Turning to the writings of British and European explorers and botanists, as well as novels and poetry by Indigenous Malay and Indian writers, she approached her “residency in the spirit of those early observers and record as much as possible.” Her delicate watercolours carry that expeditionary tone, specimens both timeless and contemporary. Fulton was drawn to the cultural fusion of plant forms incorporated into decorative patterns, temple carvings, embroidered and printed fabrics, resilient both in their traditional reference but also their urban reality. It was a cue Watson also picked up on. Her screen print, Good things happen in threes (2010), inspired by a small fig tree growing out of a crack in the concrete under the kampong house, became a metaphor for cultural resilience. Combining textile techniques, motifs and images associated with Chinese, Malay and Indian traditions, she used the sensitivity and time-consuming quality of her medium – textile art – as a bridge between histories and futures. They are as painterly as Foubister’s brooding landscape or Gutteridge’s anthropomorphic clouds urging connections, and clearly as alert as Brooks’ ‘found’ pictograms and Twigg’s fish boxes in finding a spirit of connection. Is it a garden cultivated? This pantun shared with Ladd best surmises the sentiment.
Kalau ada sumur di ladang,
Boleh hamba menumpang mandi?
Kalau ada umur yang panjang,
Boleh kita berjumpa lagi?
If there’s a pond in the field
may I take a bath?
If I live long enough
can we meet again?
The intimacy of that elementary, somewhat raw, engagement of laying oneself bare to take a bath in an open field, mirrors the trust shared between artist and hosts. It also captures the deep connection such an experience affords, and continues to reside in all these artists. Ladd translated the pantun as ‘a proposal of love’ a future shared, a garden that continues to flourish.
Gina Fairley was at Rimbun Dahan in 2005 as accompanying spouse of Tony Twigg.
1. William Robinson. Sourced 27 June 2013, http://www.grafico-qld.com/content/william-robinson-transfigured-landscape.
The exhibition was opened by Angela Hijjas, Visual Arts Program Director at Rimbun Dahan, on 28 August at the Adelaide College of the Arts.
Cultivating the Garden
When we started the residency I knew it was an important idea, but really I only considered it from our own perspective: we had benefited greatly from Australian and Malaysian opportunities, and had always wanted to “pay back”. Hijjas’ choice was to start the residency for Australian and Malaysian artists, and my job was to organize it. Probably it wasn’t until Gina and Tony repeatedly mentioned what a gift a year away from normal life was, that I too appreciated what an impact it was having on people’s lives.
So while I was pre-occupied pushing round saplings in a wheelbarrow for my Southeast Asian garden, there was a lot happening in the studios. The artists had a whole year to work on ideas, and that year was long enough for us to form lasting friendships. That was a great bonus for me, having been out of Australia for so long; conversations over drinks or dinner, or on the way back from the tennis court, greatly enriched our lives. As a practical sort of person, I had seen my job as glorified housekeeper, but I had the privilege of getting to know all of our guests over their year and realized that it was more than just housekeeping: we were participating in the actual creative process.
It is now almost 20 years since John Foubister was persuaded to take the gamble on a trip to Malaysia. He was “found” at very short notice by the son-in-law of a friend, Keith Neighbour. John was paired with a Malaysian artist, Yuande Zheng, who had presented himself as the answer to our search for a Malaysian artist. I didn’t know how to consider the talents or the pairing, but we learned a lot along the way! Definitely one has to provide separate accommodation and studios for each artist, and never get involved in personalities or disputes! Keep a professional distance, and just make sure they have everything they need to do what they are there to do. I learned that quite quickly after a particularly difficult year early on, and although Hijjas’ advice was to drop the residency if it was too much trouble, by then I had realized that it was important.
Now fortunately we have daughter Bilqis taking an active role, and as her expertise is in contemporary dance the programme now includes lots of that, and the dance studio is in constant demand.
The renovated heritage houses have been an added bonus, as without the residency there would have been no use for them, and no incentive to buy and restore them, so it’s thanks to the programme that they too have been saved.
Another direct result of the residency has been our interest in Georgetown, Penang. It was because of the hugely positive response to the city from all the artists who went there that I started looking for a house there to use for a residency extension. It was Hijjas who eventually found the site of what would become Hotel Penaga, but had the artists’ interest not been so intense, I probably would have overlooked the possibility of having anything there at all…. So the entire process has been a very reciprocal engagement: a Colombo Plan scholarship for Hijjas in the 50s enabled his career, he then contributed to the careers of artists in both Australia and Malaysia, the artists enriched our lives in huge ways, enabling the development of Rimbun Dahan with the old houses, and the hotel in Penang, quite apart from the personal links, like Gina helping us with the book for Hijjas’ 70th birthday, or this exhibition in Australia!
Now after 20 years, we have to make a few changes. Unfortunately we won’t be funding Australian residencies as before, and we will concentrate more on inviting and funding Southeast Asian artists who wouldn’t have the chance to travel otherwise.
The most exciting development recently is in Horsham, Victoria. Many of you know that we have had a project going there since the Asian Currency Crisis in 1997… again it was a stroke of luck to invest there, and we have since bought a beautiful paddock on the Wimmera River where Hijjas had the idea of building a residency. We have commissioned Glenn Murcutt as architect, and it will accommodate Australian and Asian artists. It is just a small programme, only for two, just as Rimbun Dahan was at the beginning, but the idea developed with the input of one of Asialink’s artists, Anthony Pelchen, who lives near Horsham and who assures me it’s not the artistic wilderness that it may appear to be! In fact his work from his Malaysian residency opens at the Horsham Regional Gallery on Friday, and the Horsham Regional Gallery will manage the residency for us. Hijjas has visions too of architecture camps in Horsham where students can connect with landscape and design.
So the garden has grown, and I always knew that the key would be diversity: plant as much as you can, as many species as possible, and see how it turns out. That has been my modus operandi for our 14 acres at Rimbun Dahan, and it seems to have worked for the residency as well: it may have been a trifle disorganized, and certainly random, but what an exciting 20 years it has turned out to be, and for that I cannot thank our artists enough, in particular Melanie and John who had the idea of doing this show, and Allison Carroll who has encouraged us from very early days. And thank you all too for coming this evening, I just wish we could stay a bit longer.
Thanks for your support and encouragement.
dot-net-dot-au was an art exhibition by Tim Craker and Louise Saxton, who separately undertook short term artist residencies at Rimbun Dahan gallery in Malaysia in 2006, exploring their most vivid impressions of the time they’ve spent travelling between their home country and Malaysia. dot-net-dot-au is an artistic meditation on the links that bind us geographically and metaphorically.
The exhibition travelled to Malaysia and Singapore. In Kuala Lumpur it was presented at The Annexe Gallery, Central Market, 10-27 July 2008, where it was supported by the Australian High Commission, Kuala Lumpur. In Singapore it appeared at The Substation, 5-17 August 2008.
Tim Craker and Louise Saxton produced two individual series of artworks that surprisingly complement and work in tandem with one another. Put side by side, the collection of works reveal a disarmingly quirky and personal insight into the experiences of two artists exploring Malaysian life and culture as outsiders.
Running through the entire series is Tim Craker’s elaboration of the net, literally and metaphorically. The net describes communication links, the sieve of memory, a tool to capture experiences and also the imaginary walls that separate cultures.
Interspersed among the nets are Louise Saxton’s insects, flowers and human figures meticulously put together from embroidered and quilted fabric. The effect is an artistic reenactment of the two artists’ process as they absorb, understand and meditate on Malaysian life and culture as outsiders.
dot-net-dot-au was also a continuation of their exhibition dot-net-dot-my at the Red Gallery Contemporary Art Space, in Melbourne, Australia, in 2007.
The exhibition was opened on 10 July at 8pm by Angela Hijjas:
It is a great pleasure to be here to open this show for Louise Saxton and Tim Craker, a show that was partially generated by our Rimbun Dahan residency programme. 2006, when Tim and Louise were resident, was a good year for us as we started inviting artists for shorter periods than the usual year long programme. That year we had a rich assembly of artists, coming and going, overlapping with different experiences from Malaysia and Australia. We hadn’t considered doing this before, as until then we had looked for people who could stay for a year, making organization easier for us, but we subsequently realized how great an impact a shorter stay in a new environment can have on creativity.
Tim and Louise are testament to that. Louise stayed with us for just a month, as that was all the time she could spare from a young family and commitments in Melbourne. For Tim, who was with us for three months, it was a chance for him, as he put it, to live as an artist, and it then precipitated the decision to leave his profession as a veterinarian to embrace his real passion, making art.
It is now obvious to me that life altering experiences don’t necessarily take a year; a month or three can be enough to generate new views of the world and significant developments in an artist’s practice. Subsequently Rimbun Dahan began inviting choreographers and performance artists as well, adding to the variety of interactions and new ideas. So I owe a lot to Tim and Louise for their contribution to Rimbun Dahan, and for their efforts since in developing their early ideas into these works in the Annexe today. Inspiration can come suddenly, but a solid art practice requires time to digest the concepts into new forms and expression.
I was lucky enough to see the beginnings of this show when it was first exhibited in Australia last year, and the potential was obvious. Despite their very different styles, both artists found common ground, not just in the net, but in the everyday experiences that are so easily overlooked in a world sated with materialism.
Louise takes the delicate hand made laces and embroideries of past decades, pieces that would have been treasured as part of a bride’s glory box, that today we rarely appreciate or examine in detail, sated as we are with too many material possessions. She carefully dissects and recasts these delicate pieces into creatures and installations that are suddenly contemporary, forcing us to look closely, to examine the minute detail and to appreciate such a visual treat in our mass produced world. By transforming lacey detail into fantastic insects, she is making a world of fantasy animals that would do nature proud. Some of her animals are indeed real, like the hornbill and koala, but when she expresses them with just a negative space we are reminded of how ephemeral the real world is, and how linked we are to our short term material possessions rather than to the really important things like birds and animals facing extinction.
By contrast, as if from the other end of the continuum, Tim takes inspiration from mass produced plastic paraphernalia that has never enjoyed much aesthetic appeal… but he transforms it into something unique and stunning, in scale and form. In 2006 he made a work for Art for Nature on the theme of appetites, all about food and its roles in our lives. Tim created a huge net of linked disposable wooden chopsticks draped in the light well of our gallery; like a fishing net it was an immense Chinese banquet “celebrating” our disposable culture. With his pieces here today, he has gone further, by choosing new disposable items and binding and cutting into them to create something beautiful and puzzling. Beautiful because of the shift in scale and the surprisingly tactile effect of plastic, and puzzling because of the complete reversal of ideas of durability and impermanence. I just wish he could do something with the orange plastic barrier blocks that now litter our roads at every turn… being stuck in a traffic jam might be a better experience for some artful transformation of the detritus that surrounds us.
Louise and Tim came to Rimbun Dahan, after being art students in Melbourne together some years before, and again in this show. Their works are from very different perspectives, and yet they reverberate against each other to create a stunning exhibition. We are honoured to have this work visit Malaysia, and for that I would like to thank the Australian High Commissions, both in KL and in Singapore for their support. Unfortunately most of the High Commission staff, including the High Commissioner herself, could not be here tonight because of an official visit from the Australian Prime Minister, but I’m sure Tim and Louise would want to thank them for the support that made the show possible.
Thank you all for coming, and I’m sure you will enjoy the show. Congratulations to both Louise Saxton and Tim Craker for a stunning exhibition that illustrates superbly what both Australian and Malaysian artists are working towards: new expression, new materials and new ideas. And I’m sure you will all enjoy it. Thank you.
by Caroline Jordan
In 2006 Tim Craker and Louise Saxton undertook sequential short-term artist residencies at Rimbun Dahan in Malaysia.Rimbun Dahan is set on fourteen acres of lush indigenous gardens featuring a fully restored nineteenth-century Malay house. The location is beautiful but remote. Craker and Saxton were bodily transported from a cold, grey Melbourne winter into a humid tropical environment and exposed to more extreme contrasts as they moved between the seductive isolation of their garden retreat and the sensory overload of crowded Asian cities.
The work they separately completed on their return to Australia they link, literally and metaphorically, to the net – a term of multiple references. Today, ‘the Net’ is everyday shorthand for the internet and the worldwide web, alluded to in the exhibition’s title dot-net-dot-au. Developed in Malaysia, made in Australia, exhibited in Melbourne and exported for viewing to Malaysia and Singapore, the exhibition is part of this contemporary globalised network of information exchange. The net as a physical entity also figures prominently, albeit very differently, in both artists’ work.
The bridal veil, made of the finest, translucent ivory-coloured net, forms the backing of Saxton’s embroidered wall pieces. This net marks a barrier between self and non-self, or, in the case of the bridal veil, a transition between one state of being (or possession) and another.
Psychologically ambiguous when considered in relation to the body, the net signifies protection but simultaneously advertises the presence of danger. The cosseted bride cocooned in her veil, or the baby breathing peacefully beneath a mosquito net, is insulated from threats lurking in the outside world. In other manifestations, like the spider’s web, the net intended to entangle and entrap is the danger.
Insect metaphors abound because the net, in many ways, defines our human interaction with them. The bee keeper goes swathed in net to collect her honey. The insect collector arms herself with the net and the jar to gather her specimens. Saxton uses embroidery pins to skewer her ‘specimens’ to the net for display. As the veil flutters gently and the pieces cast a shadow against the wall, they take on an illusory delicate life.
Saxton draws inspiration from a collection of women’s domestic crafts she has amassed over many years. Items such as hand-embroidered table linen and lace, once treasures destined for a bride’s glory-box, are now culturally obsolete in Australia and are commonly found discarded in charity shops. Saxton has added to this collection aesthetically-related crafts from other traditions, including Chinese papercuts and Indian wall embroidery. In a painstaking process of extraction and reconstruction that takes place over many hours, Saxton cuts, glues, stitches and backs hundreds of the tiny coloured textile or paper fragments into new configurations. Among the more common motifs found in the Western embroideries are butterflies and flowers, based on and debased from natural history prototypes going back to the eighteenth century. Influenced by this and the memory of the Malaysian garden, she transforms them into fantastical individual insects or cloud-like swarms. Lately, these have expanded into more complex compositions drawing on Asian spiritual imagery: henna hand stencils Saxton found in Kuala Lumpur, a seventh-century Cambodian Buddha head, traced from a book, the Yoga Tree of Life, a Chinese Cloud motif and a Star Flower, based on a Malay Islamic design. These compositions contain a motif-within-a-motif in the negative space in the centre of each work. For example, the Malaysian Hornbill sits within A bird in the Hand and the Australian Koala within Home-Tree. Both species are threatened. As Saxton explains: ‘The use of the negative form within the highly decorative outer motif becomes a metaphor of vulnerability and potential loss, (of species and also traditions) common to both our cultures.’
As far removed from the individuality and preciousness of Saxton’s salvaged, decorative elements as possible, the elements of Craker’s grids, nets and patterns are mass-produced and interchangeable. Craker chooses items such as moulded plastic spoons, cups and lunch-boxes not only for their ‘transformative potential’, but because they are readily available, easily worked and, not least, cheap (650 plastic cups or fifty metres of orange safety fencing are still affordable). The abundance of these cheap throw-away objects gives the artist licence to experiment freely on a larger scale and to explore the potential of the multiple. As he observes, he likes making ‘something big out of something little’, or perhaps even, something out of nothing. Taken individually, these disposable, transparent, almost weightless objects are so self-effacing and familiar that they almost disappear into their surroundings. Taken together, as units linked into wall or floor-sized configurations they become monumental, although not overpowering. They retain a sense of provisional-ness as they buckle or sag, sway in the breeze or gleam in reflected light in response to subtle changes in their environment. By keeping his touch light, Craker draws out of the banality, even abjectness, of his materials an unexpected quality – grace.
Although Craker works within the staple of abstract art, the grid, and preserves and observes the integrity of his minimalist units, he is not interested in ‘pure’ formalism or in creating self-referential, impersonal systems. Craker’s ‘recycling’ has a humanistic and environmentalist dimension. This is most clearly expressed in his Botanical Data Files series, in which leaves emerge as positive shapes from a snipped-away grid, the orange plastic leaf litter left in untidy drifts on the floor. Craker’s patterns refer to things in the world, among other things: genetic codes and their transcription errors, cellular arrays and honeycomb, three-dimensional computer drawing and molecular models. By juxtaposing the organic with the plastic and non-biodegradable in Botanical Data Files, Craker draws a different affect out of his despised materials, which he acknowledges as products of hyper-consumerism and an environmentally-destructive petrochemical industry. Similarly, his use of food utensils in such works as Cascade, Blanket and Ripple is not purely a matter of the expediency of a cheap available resource. He has said he is drawn to using food utensils, not only for the tactile attractions of their immediately-recognisable and particular shapes, but to what food and the sharing of food represents. Craker mentions the role food – recipes, preparation, eating – has played in the successful meeting of his family with that of his Malaysian partner. Food both epitomises cultural difference and offers the means to transcend it through common civilised rituals.
In dot-net-dot-au Saxton and Craker are concerned with identifying the threads of commonality that link their Malaysian experiences with their Australian lives – from the mutually-sustaining human traditions of ritual, food and the decorative arts to the global stresses on a fragile, shared environment. This travelling exhibition in Malaysia and Singapore brings their work full circle, back to its source. The Malaysian garden that once haunted the Australian studio now frames the work and reveals its hybridity from a different angle.
Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO) was established in 1982 when it opened its Refuge, Malaysia’s first shelter for battered women and their children. Currently, the Refuge shelters an average of 100 women and 140 children per year. WAO has also expanded to include two additional operational centres: a Child Care Centre for the children of its former residents and the WAO Centre, which functions as an advocacy and service centre for the public. In addition, WAO continues to play a leading role in advocacy, public education as well as law and policy reform to bring about gender equality.
This year, WAO celebrates its 25th year of service to women and children.
Among the events lined up to commemorate this important milestone is an art fundraiser entitled Half of Malaysia. Besides WAO being half the age of Malaysia, the title of the fundraiser also recognises that women constitute half the population of this country.
The artworks will be on display at the Underground Gallery until 30 July 2007. Gallery opening hours will be between 10am to 6pm on Sunday, 29 July 2007 and Monday, 30 July 2007.
For further inquiries, please contact Gabrielle Low at 012-2182771 or Adrian Kisai at 012-9429959.
Proceeds from the sale of artworks will go towards WAO’s Refuge and Child Care Centre.
Angela Hijjas will conduct a tour of Rimbun Dahan on Sunday 29th July, including the garden, Rumah Uda Manap, the herb garden Taman Sari, the gallery and artists studios. Meet at the front gate of Rimbun Dahan at 9am. See map.
For participants of the tour, a donation of RM20 per person, children RM10, will go to support the work of WAO. Refreshments will be provided at the end of the visit that should take about three hours. Please wear long sleeves and trousers, and bring along mosquito repellent.
As another cycle of visiting artists’ comes to a close, all the current residents of Rimbun Dahan had an open studio day in early November to share with each other, as well as Angela and guests at Rimbun Dahan, how they have been developing their art practices while at Rimbun Dahan.
Visits to the studios of Tim Craker ( a Melbourne painter turned sculptor on a 3-month self-funded residency), Patricia Sykes ( the Asialink writer for 2006), Chang Yoong Chia (the Rimbun Dahan year-long Malaysian resident), David Jolly (the Rimbun Dahan year-long Australian resident), and Helen Bodycomb (a Melbourne mosaicist on a 3-month self-funded residency) gave all an opportunity to share insights into their practices and to the experience of being at Rimbun Dahan.
Chang Yoong Chia and David Jolly will be showing their work in the Underground Gallery at Rimbun Dahan from 28 January 2007. The Gallery will be open to the public for two weeks from that date.
Former Rimbun Dahan resident artists from Australia return to Malaysia for a joint exhibition. The images below were taken at the opening dinner on 14 June 2005.
