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.
Artist-in-residence at Rimbun Dahan from March to June 2007, Donna created new performance piece bringing together local Malaysian dancers, video and sound artists to explore the idea of waiting, passing time, momentum and interruption in Extended Periods of Waiting, which was performed on June 8 2007 at The Annexe Central Market. The work featured live sound by SiCKL, video projection by Saiful Razman and Au Sow Yee, lighting by Roman Cruz and performance by Donna Miranda, Bilqis Hijjas, Yuka Tanaka, Louise Yow Sing-Hwa, Low Shee Hoe, Shaifuddin Mamat and Chan Seau Huvi.
The trio section from Extended Periods of Waiting was performed again as part of the Tari! 07 festival at ASWARA in July 2007.
During her stay, Donna also created I Will Think About It, a contribution to the 2007 Art for Nature exhibition in collaboration with visual artist Saiful Razman, and featuring Poodien. She also conducted a workshop in contemporary dance, creative process and free movement improvisation at the Annexe Central Market in June 2007.
Donna and Poodien creating I Will Think About It.
Donna received dance training as national government scholar of the Philippine High School for the Arts, pursuing professional practice and further training with Ballet Philippines, Philippine Ballet Theater, Myra Beltran’s Dance Forum and specialized training in contemporary dance at the 2005 DanceWEB Europe Scholarship Programme, in Vienna, Austria. She has since been actively involved in multimedia projects that explore new possibilities through works that combine contemporary dance, new media, fashion, physical theater, spoken word and sound. In 2000, she co-founded Green Papaya Art Projects, building a research platform for contemporary dance in Manila through its Anatomy Projects (AP+). Her solo ‘Beneath Polka-dotted Skies’ recently received 2007 Jury Prize Award in the Yokohama Solo X Duo Competition in Japan.
I Will Think About It, choreographed by Donna Miranda.
Low Shee Hoe and Donna Miranda in a duet from Extended Periods of Waiting.
A scene from Extended Periods of Waiting at the Annexe Central Market.
The four-person dance collective EU & ME (European Union & a little MISTAKE and an EXCUSE) consisting of
Joey CHUA Poh Yi (Singapore, Hong Kong)
Marie CHABERT (France, UK)
Csilla NAGY (Hungary)
Rhys TURNER (Australia)
performed their work FIND.MOVE.PLAY, an interactive physical theatre performance with digital art, for the opening night of the Art for Nature Exhibition at Rimbun Dahan on Saturday 24 July 2010. [Photos below by Anthony Pelchen.]
The Collective began in 2008 in New York, in the frame of the Dance Collective programme organised by OMI international Arts Centre. Then the artists collaborated in the Czech Republic as resident artists of CESTA Festival. After four successful presentations in Hong Kong and Singapore this performance at Rimbun Dahan is the closing show of a one-month tour.
EU & ME arrived at Rimbun Dahan on Saturday 17 July, and within the space of a week created a 45-minute work tailored to the specific spaces of Rimbun Dahan as well as inspired by the artists’ own experiences of being on a residency in Southeast Asia and discovering life in Malaysia.
FIND.MOVE.PLAY was performed at 10pm on 24 July as the final event on the opening night of Art for Nature. Information about the performance was provided through an announcement during the opening ceremonies, and by flyers distributed on the dinner tables.
The performers used a number of different sites around the property, including the central space of the underground gallery, the reflective lotus pond, outdoor sculptures and herb garden. The performers invited the audience of 100-200 people to follow them from site to site, linking the vignettes with a narrative about Orpheus and searching for love.
The performance incorporated digital art, with a dance film taking a comic look at residencies at Rimbun Dahan, and an interactive soundscape in which selected audience members wearing headphones heard the accompanying music change as they moved around the space. The audience was also invited to participate in the work, manipulating the dancers, helping them with specific tasks, answering questions and holding flashlights.
FIND.MOVE.PLAY alternated impressionistic romantic moments – Joey Chua wearing a traditional Chinese cheongsam and singing a Chinese love song while paddling herself about among waterlilies, or Marie Chabert flinging herself about among towered sculptures of lit glass – with moments of slapstick comedy, as when Marie slapped Rhys Turner on the face in retaliation for his bad pickup lines, and moments of unforgettable eeriness, such as Csilla Nagy’s mysterious inhuman emergence from the darkened pool followed by her literally stalking a quivering audience member. The tone of the work transitioned easily, tracing the natural atmospheres of the various different performance sites.
In addition to being a fun, funny and thought-provoking work in its own right, FIND.MOVE.PLAY also functioned perfectly as a teaser for Dancing in Place, a weekend of site-specific contemporary dance performances that will take place at Rimbun Dahan during the final week of the Art for Nature exhibition. By using multiple venues in very different ways, the audience was able to appreciate the potential for site-specific work at Rimbun Dahan. For many members of the audience more used to visual art, it served as an accessible introduction to contemporary dance and audience participation.
This performance was supported by and National Arts Council (Singapore).
Above: title: ‘Samson’, acrylic and charcoal on paper, 152x183cm, 2007. Collection: Dr. Steve Wong.
As an artist, Ahmad Fuad Osman (b. 1969) is not limited by the restrictions of medium or mode of expressions which is evident in his drawings, paintings, digital prints, video, multimedia installations and performances. He graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the School of Fine Arts, Institut Teknologi MARA Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia in 1991. He has had five solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows locally and internationally and recipient of numerous awards and grants. He lives and works in Kuala Lumpur and Melaka.
Ahmad Fuad Osman’s new body of works of paintings and slide projection for residency exhibition titled ‘Recollections of Long Lost Memories’ is initially inspired by the 50th Merdeka celebration. Large oil on canvas paintings deal with the lack of historical awareness especially with the younger generation in their discounted version of Malaysia’s history, current and topical issues, as they all are too caught up with latest gadget or trend. By selecting certain important occasions or moments in the nation’s history and using old archival photos related to the event as reference, Ahmad Fuad painted them larger than life in black & white and inserted an anonymous but contemporary person into the composition, juxtaposing the past with the present, creating a dialogue.
Fuad presented his new body of work at the 13th Rimbun Dahan Residency Exhibition, alongside the work of Australian resident artist Gabrielle Bates, 13 to 27 January 2008, at the Rimbun Dahan gallery.
Above: A still from ‘Dreaming of Being a Somebody, Afraid of Being a Nobody (Malaysian Version)’, single channel video, 16 mins 37 sec, colour sound, 2007. This work was created for the Art for Nature 2007 exhibition at Rimbun Dahan.
BY CARMEN NGE
The occasion of our nation’s 50th Merdeka this year has been a convenient excuse to excavate the past. To celebrate our coming of age, art galleries respectfully mount exhibitions that reference the historic occasion or that unearth artifacts from a (not so) distant past. It was at such an exhibition that the idea for his “Recollections of the Long Lost Memories” series came to Ahmad Fuad Osman.
As he gazed upon an old picture of Tunku Abdul Rahman crossing a river, Fuad kept seeing another person standing in front of the Tunku. In his mind’s eye, this someone was distinctly from the present and as Fuad pored over other pictures, more figures from the present began to people the blank spaces in the photographs.
“History is false memory,” Fuad muses as we chat in his residency studio. “We don’t get to influence history thus we don’t care about it that much.” Certainly, most young Malaysians’ marginal contact with history occurs in the classroom in the form of dry textbooks and uninspired teaching.
History is false memory because history is selective; the saying that history is written by the victors is certainly true in our own nation. Why do we remember Tunku’s “Merdeka” cry but not the bombing of the Tugu Negara in 1975? What deal did the ruling elites strike with the British to gain independence? Those of us who lived through the events of 1957 remember it very differently from those of us yet to be born. But discrepancies exist, even among those who experienced similar events. Humans are adroit at forgetting details they’d rather not remember. Who preserves our nation’s memories and to what end? And do younger Malaysians really care?
Fuad’s paintings and slides for “Recollections of the Long Lost Memories” are, in part, a response to our nostalgia-steeped 50th anniversary celebrations. His huge canvases juxtapose past and present by constructing a collision between the older and younger generations, who are clearly differentiated by the former’s sepia, monochromatic tones and the latter’s brighter colours. Fuad’s portraits of Tunku are confidently rendered in strong brushstrokes—Malaysia’s most revered Prime Minister is, unsurprisingly, clearly remembered and his aura, intense and palpable.
The ‘intruders’ from the present, however, add a layer to Fuad’s work never before seen. They inject themselves into archived history and Tunku’s time-space with irreverent gusto and youthful exuberance; the hippie-like character in Fuad’s slide projections makes us smile. Here is an updated, post-reality TV and retro cool version of John Lennon’s doppelgänger—complete with round sunglasses and a peacenik vibe but who is also an ardent Manchester United fan. Is this the overseas-educated, postmodern Melayu Baru in search of his roots or is he merely soaking in the historical sights to feed his cam-whoring?
For the first time in the artist’s oeuvre, humour surfaces. From his salad days at UiTM and subsequent first few exhibitions as part of the Matahati art group in the early 90s, Fuad has always expressed a penchant for the philosophical and the serious. From early abstract pieces to later figurative ones, as well as occasional installation and performance art, Fuad is best described as a heady artist. He has experimented with irony and visual satire but never humour and whimsy.
Perhaps his year long residency in Korea and a previous shorter stint in Vermont, USA has allowed Fuad new vistas of expression. It is a risk to be sure for audiences rarely expect to see humour in art. Yet it is a fitting tool with which to interrogate our nation’s history because as we look back on the last 50 years and consider the antics of our politicians, the deplorable state of our leaky infrastructure, the shenanigans of our police force and the lackadaisical attitude of the populace, how can we not laugh at ourselves?
The 2007 Australian artist in residence at Rimbun Dahan is Gabrielle Bates (6. 1967). An honors graduate from the University of Sydney, New South Wales, she has exhibited professionally since 1993 and is the recipient of a number of awards, grants and residency placements. Gabrielle’s works have been acquired for corporate, institutional and private collections in Australia, UK, USA and Malaysia.
‘Mouth of flowers’ is Gabrielle’s new body of experimental paintings, objects and video work produced this year while in residence at Rimbun Dahan, Kuala Lumpur. Gabrielle’s exploration of patterns and figuration has produced a series of canvas-based works that combine water colour, Rimbun Dahan pond water, hand-embroidered nylon thread, Chinese ink and synthetic polymer paint. The works combine Southeast Asian motifs, signage and local media with figuration to explore the political and poetic subtleties of life for artists in Malaysia and southeast Asia.
Artists such as Saiful Razman, Noor Mahnun Mohamed, Husin Hourmain, Donna Miranda, Ahmad Fuad Osman, Shaffudin Mamat, Low Shee Hoe, Lau Mun Leng and Bilqis Hijjas have all posed for Bates during her residency. In turn, she has transformed them into players within a fictional narrative that circles the conflicts, anxieties, insights and advantages of (self) censorship.
Her objects, collected from the ordinary Kelompang jari (Sterculia foetida) pods, have been reconfigured with nylon thread and decorative elements such as sequins and velvet appliqué, morphing the pods into a collection of anthropomorphous objects.
Gabrielle presented ‘Mouth of flowers’ at the 13th Rimbun Dahan Residency Exhibition, alongside the work of Malaysian resident artist Ahmad Fuad Osman, 13 to 27 January 2008, at the Rimbun Dahan gallery.
The elasticity of a golden thread
by Gina Fairley
Our lives are filled with pattern: The patterned regimentation of our actions; our personal ‘style’; the family that frames us; our cultural fabric; conservatisms and beliefs. We wear an invisible code that defines who we are, our DNA. Collectively, this is ourpattern.
Gabrielle Bates has long used quasi-ethnographic motifs as a device to transfer information about the people she paints. In her earlier portraits the sitter reverberated across the canvas, floating on a flat colour field. Like a print slightly out of register, their ghost-like repetition, or flaw, reaffirmed their humanity. Bold black outlines held their pattern allowing us to decode who they might be.
While these early portraits offer a clear trajectory to these new works, the “Mouth of Flowers” series comes from a very different position: psychologically, emotionally and culturally. Their patterning goes beyond a descriptor to physically consume the form. The body and pattern have fused as one.
Malaysia’s hybridity makes an indelible impression on every artist visiting Rimbun Dahan. For Bates that engagement was filled with multiplicity: it offered an organic tangibility to the work spawned from its bounty of pods, natural patterns and pond water; it provided the solitude to rediscover embroidery, sewing a personal and emotional narrative; and it offered the gift of insight, journeying beyond perceptions.
Finding Malaysia’s pattern is complex. At an elementary level it lies in its graphic traditions of batik, henna decoration and Islamic geometry. At a cerebral level it is the patterning of socio-political / religious striations of a nation at a time when it is asking ‘what is its contemporary identity?’ Bates’ work traces a thread across these ideas, oscillating between reverie and bounce. Remove the exotic ‘pattern’ and it is a narrative caught in a web of time, territory and transition.
Bates found this narrative in a coterie of artists, dancers and musicians who explore the peripheral through their creativity. The narratives are dense but less self-effacing; the ‘outlines’ have become diffused. She replaces ethnographic patterning with a floral fragility, caught between romantic apparition and an earthy reality. Often clothed in little more than an organic epidermis, her players are exposed. But these characters are not vulnerable. If we look at the painting “Armour”, banana flowers (bunga pisang) rise up like a noxious weed, beautiful but threatening, clutching at a woman’s neck rendering her speechless. But she does not turn away; her gaze does not flare in distress – it is a knowing censure.
In “Stir” she sleeps enveloped by the same flowers. Is it the peace of submission, death or sleep? Is she weightless or weighted by her floral shroud? Paired with a mirror-image caught between cartoon and apparition, it sits against a brave white ground acting as a stark alter-ego to the velvety, painterly background of the sleeping figure. It is a kind of intermezzo between figuration and the ephemeral.
“KL-ing me softly” is equally charged from the outset, challenging protocols and permissions. But there is an inherent softness that sits counter to any overt act or statement. It mixes memory and ambivalence with a restless exoticism. These works are about a visual psychology. Just as a Rorschach drawing triggers association but has no one reading, Bates has moved beyond the clarity of descriptors to an elasticity of meaning. She pushes us beyond the desire to translate and give over to poetic nuance.
The materials of these new works take on a symbolism we have not seen before. Her stitched portraits have a latent violence or emotional trigger. The act of piercing the surface of a painting has that same duality as a tattoo; it is branding and an aesthetic expression. “First cut” captures this tension, the thread’s assertive lines slashing the canvas. The figure turns from himself but is denied a freedom, anchored by his own voice. Rendered speechless, we ask who has the power of censure over this voice? Caught in the strain between a sewn and brushed mark, it is a courageous embrace of new materials.
Bates similarly plays off the organic purity of seed pods against lurid plastic flowers and synthetic thread. The pods disgorge their floral centres, over-ripe with fleshy fertility. These are incredibly sensual objects that Bates lashes into control. The synthetic materiality of the flowers beg the question, are we fooled by beauty? It is another veil seemingly ‘natural’ yet contrived, controlled and plastic?
Many of these works teeter on the edge where things are raw and flirt with the unknown. To quote writer John Barrett-Lennard, “Accent can be thought of as a kind of excess, a disturbance in the smoothness of sound and communication.” (1.) An accent, like a pattern, has a personal intonation. It is about reading between the lines; it is the place of hyphens. Sometimes it is barely audible; sometimes it has the gentleness of a lover and at others the affirmation of belief. “Mouth of Flowers” is a place to hear things.
Gina Fairley
1. John Barrett-Lennard “Here and Now” catalogue essay for Simryn Gill, PICA exhibition, Perth 2001.
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.
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?
