Recent work draws on the ideas of both physical and metaphorical ‘interiors’. I merge the flatness of wallpaper patterns with a view of a built interior, where a door or window may offer a view into an illusory space and operate as a metaphor for perception, memory and the body. This has led to new work that is influenced by organic imperfection; warped thinking processes and the idea that pattern is just one layer in a multi-dimensional world. There is also a sense of longing, of perhaps trying to find that ‘unthought-of’ thought.
My current research is in the area of pattern, script, pseudo-script and graphic symbols in traditional and contemporary Malaysian culture. I am developing ways to incorporate printmaking into my painting and stitching work. I am also currently working on a collaborative project with Mike Ladd involving still photography, video, sound and text, drawing on the pantun form.
Where’s Emily 1 (1mx1.2m, oil on canvas)
Where’s Emily 2 (1mx1.2m, oil on canvas)
Where’s Emily 3 (1mx1.2m, oil on canvas)
About the Artist
Adelaide-based visual artist Cathy Brooks graduated with a B.A. in Fine Arts from the S.A. School of Art in Photography and Sculpture, followed by a Master of Visual Art and Design in Painting at UniSA in 2007. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, and her solo exhibitions in Adelaide include IMAGINARIUM at the Prospect Gallery in 2008, Waves at Tin Cat Gallery in 2005 and High Road at Greenhill Gallery in 2002. Her work appears in collections at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Mortlock Library in South Australia, Trades Hall in South Australia, Prospect Council, and Chroma Colour Photographics. Cathy has come to Malaysia as the recipient of a Professional Development Travel Grant from Arts SA. Her work combines media and techniques from photography, fabric design and printing, and drawing and painting.
Dan Wollmering was born in St. Paul Minnesota, USA and immigrated to Australia in 1975. He is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts and Sculpture Studio Coordinator, Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University.
Wollmering holds the following degrees: BA, MFA and PhD and has held 25 solo exhibitions and work included in over 40 group exhibitions internationally. Completing major public artworks in Australia, China and the USA, he was recently awarded the prestigious Contempora Sculpture Award for a socio/political work that part sculpture and part architecture. He has participated in overseas residencies including Malaysia, USA, and the Ninth Guilin International Sculpture Symposium in Southern China. A recipient of the Dame Elizabeth Murdoch Sculpture Award (CSA), he also received a Nomination Award for the Beijing Olympic Park Sculpture Design Competition. His work is represented in private, corporate and public collections including Regional Galleries and Universities in Victoria. The artist is represented by Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne and BMGArt, Adelaide.
He was one of the resident artists for Rimbun Dahan’s residency in 2009, and did a short residency in Hotel Penaga in 2014.
Rimbun Dahan Artist Statement (2009)
Lately, I have been trying to reduce the clutter that inundates our lives. Whether its junk mail, email spam or just ‘things’ that build up over time in the bottom kitchen drawer, the backyard shed or those items that suddenly make their appearance when rifling through the wardrobe, closet, bookshelves or unopened boxes − throwing out is satisfying.
As a sculptor, clutter is a constant companion in the studio. I find it difficult to depose of anything that inhabits a sense of wonder and aesthetic potential – compounded by the fact that someday, it could form the basis of a new sculpture.
For the last five years or so, much of my practice has followed suit; whereby, my aim is to reduce and crystallise the essence of the form and thus the concept. It follows in the tradition of Minimalism – perhaps less of the ‘hard edge’ and more of the ‘organic’ type.
In this manner, the work is abstract, sometimes familiar and sometimes ambiguous in their final character. Stable and unstable, expanding and contracting, the forms may also suggest references to a secret and mysterious life form; one of less perplexity and in keeping with the forces of a self-ordering system of modular construction and organic unity.
As a sculptor, I am forever cognisant of the rich and marvellous history of both eastern and western sculpture traditions, and to that end, my small gestures and contributions to an expanding and vibrant culture and arguably, one of the most challenging disciplines in the visual arts.
Penaga Residency Artist Statement (2014)
During his stay, Wollmering will be researching and documenting architectural forms from a variety of sources in George Town − as a catalyst for new abstract sculpture. Using the rich and diverse cultural make-up of Penang and the built-environment structures emanating from Malay, Chinese and Indian influences, Wollmering will be locating and referencing unique constructs as a conduit to new sculptural forms in his practice. Using mainly cardboard and low-tech construction methods, he will be creating hypothetical sculpture maquettes with a chosen few being made in steel by a local sculpture fabrication firm in Penang. These new works will then be exhibited in the Penaga Hotel and at Flinders Lane Gallery; a commercial gallery in Melbourne that he has been exhibiting with since 1990.
In 2009, Australian poet Mike Ladd spent some time at Rimbun Dahan working on four-lined poems inspired by the Malaysian pantun form, as well as writing a prose fiction work about corruption and the world trade in orangutans as pets.
In July 2010 Mike Ladd launched “The Eye of the Day”, a film poem he made during his residency at Rimbun Dahan, at the Lit Up Festival in Singapore. The film features Rumah Uda Manap, the restored Perak kampung house at Rimbun Dahan. Former resident artist Tony Twigg exhibited the film at his Slot Gallery in Sydney.
In September 2010, “The Eye of the Day” won equal first prize for the best new media poem at the Overload Poetry Festival in Melbourne.
Bio
Mike Ladd is currently producer and presenter of ABC Radio National’s poetry program Poetica.
Born in 1959, he grew up at Blackwood in the Adelaide Hills. After completing a Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy at Adelaide University, he began to publish his poetry widely in Australia. He has often collaborated with musicians, including the groups The Drum Poets and newaural net. Mike has published 6 books of poetry. The latest, Transit, was published by Five Islands Press in 2007.
In 2006 he was awarded the Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship at the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and was a guest of Venezuela’s World Poetry Festival.
Works in Progress
Here are some of the “Pantun Rimbun Dahan” in progress during Mike’s residency:
I start the great four-bladed ceiling fan.
Seconds later, a gecko drops to the floor,
stunned. Yes, the world’s like that.
We all hang on as long as we can.
*
From the estate’s wall grey macaques leap
into the laden mango tree.
From your side of the bed, you told me to sleep,
but the night’s so warm, and I want something juicy.
In the warm evening, smoke drifts from the end
of a sweet and unhurried clove cigarette.
Your mind has thinned, then gone, old friend.
But the sense you made, I won’t forget.
*
That cicada sounds like a dentist,
drilling all day into my eye-tooth nerve.
Shrilling on and on about Time,
everything you love, but can’t preserve.
*
Out of the sky of luminous black
rain falls joyfully. You and I
who lived so long alone together
now walk again under one umbrella.
One of Eve Lambert’s costume designs, created from a parachute.
Thanks to the support of Scottish Arts Council, costume designer Eve Lambert spent three weeks at Rimbun Dahan in October 2008, working with resident choreographer Lina Limosani, designing and creating costumes for Lina’s contemporary dance work A Delicate Situation .
Eve Lambert first trained in fashion design at College Marie-Victorin, Montreal. During the course of her studies, Eve was selected for the final of a fashion contest in Paris, to participate in a design seminar in Copenhagen and was granted an award for best student of the Fashion Design Program in both her 2nd and 3rd years. Following this, she was awarded a scholarship from the Fashion Foundation of Montreal to study Performance Costume at the Edinburgh College of Art. Whilst studying, Eve undertook various work experience opportunities in order to gain experience in costume design and construction for theatre, film, television, dance and puppetry, in both Montreal and Edinburgh.
In 2007, Eve was invited to present her degree work at the West Kilbride Gallery, Scotland. Since then, her professional practice has included designing costume for X-Factor Dance Company (Edinburgh) on various productions such as ‘Ragnarok’ (2007), ‘Person or Persons Unknown’ (short film, 2007), ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms’ (site specific, 2008) and ‘Unspoken’ (2008). Other experiences include collaborating with puppet theatre company The Pupper Lab (Edinburgh), on ‘EH3’ (2006), ‘The Big Shop-Inverness’ (2007) and ‘The Gift’ (2008). Her most recent work includes designing costumes for ‘The Red Room’ by David Hughes Dance and Al Seed (Traverse Theatre, 2008). See attached for samples of Eve’s work.
From 16 to 21 September 2008, British physical theatre artist Al Seed conducted an intensive workshop for actors and dancers interested in exploring physical theatre.
Al Seed giving feedback during the workshop.
Al Seed is the Artist in Residence at The Byre Theatre, St. Andrews, and a Creative Associate of The Arches, Glasgow. He also works as a free-lance performer, writer and director and hosts master-classes in a range of disciplines.
Al received an M.A. in Theatre, Film & Television from the University of Glasgow before studying Physical Theatre and Contemporary Circus Skills at Circomedia, Bristol. He now creates both solo and collaborative works of theatre drawing on a variety of physical disciplines including clown, buffoon and mask-work and often combines the use of these disciplines ith original text.
Al is an award-winning artist who performances have toured in Europe, and he also has acted extensively for film and television. For more information, see his website http://www.alseed.net/.
Physical Theatre Workshop with Al Seed & Lina Limosani
From 16 to 21 September, British physical theatre artist Al Seed conducted an intensive workshop for actors and dancers interested in exploring physical theatre.
Al was invited to Rimbun Dahan by Australian resident choreographer Lina Limosani, to help her lay the foundations for her new contemporary dancework to be performed in Malaysia in December 2008. A number of the workshop participants will perform in the work.
Eight participants — Low Shee Hoe, Grace Ng, David Lim, Elaine Pedley, Suhaili Micheline bt Ahmad Kamil, Shirley Ng, Mcebisi Bhayi, Lee Hui Ling and Teresa Chian — spent long hours in the Dance Studio at Rimbun Dahan with Al and Lina working with masks and costumes, concentrating on rhythmic isolations, developing movements for inhuman creature characters, and being introduced to the painful and confronting truths of clown work.
Above: First day, taking creature work out into the garden. The task: reacting to every sound.
Below: The last day, creature work with self-made costumes in the dance studio, exploring what a costume wants to do.
South African dancer-choreographer Mcebisi Bhayi first came to Rimbun Dahan on a residency with Singaporean choreographer Joey Chua. He returned to Malaysia for a short residency in September 2008, during which time he taught a workshop in Afro-contemporary dance to members of the local dance community.
Bio
Bhayi was one of the three finalists of the Shell Road to Fame Talent Search in Johannesburg in 1995. In 1999 he participated in the Community Dance Teachers Training Programme at Moving Into Dance. Bhayi was a nominee for Most Promising Male Dancer in Contemporary Style at the FNB Dance Umbrella in Johannesburg in 2001. In 2002, Bhayi won the Peak of the Stepping Stones Award. He attended the FNB Dance Umbrella Young Choreographers’ Residency in 2007 and 2008. His works ‘Free Us Now’ and ‘Muntu’ were featured in FNB Dance Umbrella in 2007. He recently attended the Young Choreographers’ Residency in Senegal in March-June 2008. He performed in Gregory Maqoma’s ‘Skeleton Dry’ at FNB Dance Umbrella in 2008.
Workshop
20 excited dancers filled the dance studio at Rimbun Dahan, to take part in Mcebisi’s Afro-contemporary dance workshop. It was an exhausting high-energy romp of furiously contracting rib-cages, cat-like leaps, and endless sequences. Mcebisi’s constant cheery exhortations — “Keep on pouncing!” — and fantastic accompaniment on the drums by Rimbun Dahan resident artist Justin Lim made it an experience to remember. Afro-Contemporary dance combines the spirit and technique of African, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Brazilian and Contemporary dance styles. It is a grounded, rhythmic dance form with movements originating from the pelvis and core.
Joey Chua (Singapore) and Mcebisi Bhayi (South Africa) were resident choreographers at Rimbun Dahan in 2008. Mcebisi and Joey’s collaboration was the first recorded instance ever of a female Asian choreographer working with a male African choreographer to produce a single work.
Tracing: Dance Dialogues in Singapore and South Africa
Mcebisi, a South African Xhosa man who swears by his customs, and Joey, a Singaporean woman who can barely speak her Chinese dialect Hakka, decided to start a dialogue. After months of letter writing and intimate sharing of childhood memories, their exchange shifts to the present as they come face-to-face, finding both common ground and contrasts in each other’s dance background, personality and physicality. In tracing the minds and bodies of one another, they hope a new dance vocabulary emerges on their creative journey together.
The dance collaboration between Joey Chua and Mcebisi Bhayi continues to evolve as a work-in-progress showing in KL followed with appearances in Hong Kong and at Singapore Esplanade’s dan:s festival. The finished work will premiere at the FNB Dance Umbrella 2009, a major dance festival in South Africa. Chua, one of Singapore’s rising young dancer-choreographers, has been involved in many collaborative projects that have taken her to festivals around the world. Bhayi is a dancer, choreographer and educator who has been nominated as Most Promising Male Dancer in Contemporary Style at the FNB Dance Umbrella 2001.
Tracing was performed at the Fonteyn Studio Theatre, FAB, Section 14, Petaling Jaya on 1-2 August 2008.
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/
Bhayi was one of the three finalists of the Shell Road to Fame Talent Search in Johannesburg in 1995. In 1999 he participated in the Community Dance Teachers Training Programme at Moving Into Dance. Bhayi was a nominee for Most Promising Male Dancer in Contemporary Style at the FNB Dance Umbrella in Johannesburg in 2001. In 2002, Bhayi won the Peak of the Stepping Stones Award. He attended the FNB Dance Umbrella Young Choreographers’ Residency in 2007 and 2008. His works ‘Free Us Now’ and ‘Muntu’ were featured in FNB Dance Umbrella in 2007. He recently attended the Young Choreographers’ Residency in Senegal in March-June 2008. He performed in Gregory Maqoma’s ‘Skeleton Dry’ at FNB Dance Umbrella in 2008.
