Raising awareness with art
Art for envisioning a different future
I was awarded first place for my artwork "‘Let’s Make Our Future a Sanctuary” for the 26th Annual Rights on Show organised by Darwin Community Legal Service (DCLS) in 2022. Winning first place garnered me a spot to exhibit my artworks in Darwin Visual Arts (DVA) gallery in 2023.
Opening Night, ‘The future we want’, DCLS 26th Annual Rights on Show, Art Awards and Exhibition, 2nd Dec 2022.
Let’s Make Our Future a sanctuary (2022). Acrylics and collage on canvas, 91.4 121.8 x 3.5 cm
Art as a response to our society
The artworks exhibited in 2023 at Darwin Visual Arts (DVA) gallery titled “Healing at the Borderland” were ideas captured from my conversations with the research participants about the nexus of culture and identities at the convergence with trauma and the impact of colonisation.
Alice in the Borderland (2023). Acrylics and charcoal on canvas, 91.4 121.8 x 3.5 cm
Reclaiming Roots as Resistance (2023). Acrylics and charcoal on canvas, 91.4 121.8 x 3.5 cm
Our Entwinement in the Borderland (2023). Acrylics and charcoal on canvas, 91.4 121.8 x 3.5 cm
Alice is roaming in a wasteland, exhausted from performing for the modernising industrial project, encapsulated in the colonial figure of James Cook the white rabbit, rushing its citizen-subjects to work for the capitalist machine. How many of us are blaming ourselves on days when we are not productive at work, instead of casting our gaze on a wider system that demands our bodies to function mechanically round the clock? The crystalline Sydney Opera House is reimagined as the monstrous instrument of modernity, where the scarce supply of the sacred is confined to a special one-night only performance. As the nonhuman world is reduced to its usefulness to the human ends, the relational world eventually wears out its magic where rational human experience takes centre stage.
Inspired by conversations with a research participant for the PhD research with a Singaporean Malay-Muslim background who currently calls Australia home, the woman’s powerful stance is an attempt to break away from the nation-state’s “good citizen” propaganda, rooted in narratives of civilisation building, capitalist pursuits and white supremacy. Cultural motifs of galangal roots, a mosque and traditional Malay village house and a serpentine figure covered with batik design entangled with the coloniser Stamford Raffles to remove him from the pedestal.
The healing process must consider how we are completely intertwined with each other and the more-than-human world. The biomedical model, while useful in the treatment of physical symptoms of illnesses, is limited because of how the field fragments the body-mind-spirit, keeping us isolated within our individual selves and from the sanctuary that the more-than-human world could offer.