A still small voice charts the artist’s attempts at finding herself and her own voice, far removed from her family while on exchange at the Royal College of Art in London. Having been silenced for so long due to familial circumstances, she does not know who she is, what she wants to do in life nor how to live. Neither is she cognisant of her hopes and dreams. It documents her attempt at trying to find and regain her agency, and her will to live, after having battled depression and anxiety for close to a quarter of her life; to look beyond her predicament.
A story of hope, the artist uses photography as influenced by her confessional poetry as an impetus and a means for her to hold on to life, to press through and to make sense of the perennial dark haze that engulfs yet, strangely, never fully consumes.
Codex Golden looks at the Golden Mile Complex. A building whose value has been questioned and contested through the decades,
it is now deemed rather irrelevant towards urbanisation and development. Yet to me, it is a place of significance where family ties, friendships and relationships are forged.
Places can be seen as specific sites that hold our experiences. It holds a unique moment where the mind, the body, and the world are aligned. They make sense out of each other and create a permanent impression in our lives. Places morph, extend and diminish. Each time we revisit them, it has the ability to build upon newer experiences or make greater meaning out of the older ones. They do so according to the people that you are with, the stage that you are in life and the situations that the universe chooses to put you in. Hence, it is a chanced occurrence yet highly specific and intentional. Each experience in a place is not replicable. They build upon each other and are a way of understanding life.
Codex Golden is a site-specific project which is essentially a collection of experiences put together by me trying to answer the following questions: What does a ‘Place’ mean? How do we deem if it is ‘Of value’? More importantly, how do we make sense out of these ‘Places’? This is performed through the act of Walking— a common thread that holds all experiences together.
Trees are the natural vessels for archaeologies written, unwritten, spoken, and unspoken. “Deciphering Banyan Tree Networks” centers around the Banyan tree, also known as the strangling fig. Throughout history, the enigmatic biology of the Banyan tree has ensured itself special status in human societies, and many have tried to capture the Banyan’s potencies through poetry, metaphor, painting, resulting in many readings and interpretations. Amongst them, the Banyan tree has been imagined as an emblem of power, unifying and destructive, a symbol of nativeness, an all-encompassing metaphor for interconnectedness. This project is a multimedia installation that aims to weave micro and macro narratives surrounding the Banyan through a study of four species of strangling ficuses and four local spaces against history, plant biology, art, sociology, and politics.
