Artist Statement

I begin with things that cannot be fully retained, such as sensations that pass, memories that blur, moments that resist being fixed. Rather than reconstructing them, I work through making and memory, allowing them to re-emerge in altered forms.

My process is slow and repetitive. Through tufting, beading, and surface-building, I accumulate material until something begins to hold. It is not a reconstruction of memory but a negotiation with it, in which fragments, distortions, and ambiguity remain visible. I am interested in how repetition and slowness allow something to settle, not into clarity, but into presence.

This instability is tied to my own experience of cultural ambiguity. Growing up between Singapore and Europe, my sense of origin has never been singular or fixed but has been shaped by partial inheritances, gestures, and impressions. What remains are not complete narratives, but traces (visual, material, and sensory) that surface without resolution. I approach these not by defining them, but by working through them.

Flowers and floral elements recur throughout my work, often drawn from traditional motifs associated with Singapore and East Asia. I am interested in how these forms circulate, detached from their original contexts, yet still carrying meaning to me and to others. Within my practice, they are not treated as singular symbols, but as part of a broader field, closer to a garden than to an image. They accumulate, overlap, and shift in relation to one another, forming spaces that are continuous yet unstable. Meaning is not fixed within them, but emerges through repetition, variation, and proximity.

Much of my work operates through the surface. I build dense, tactile environments where detail and excess begin to obscure as much as they reveal. In these works, ornament is not applied but embedded: a way of structuring attention through texture, rhythm, and accumulation. What might initially appear decorative becomes a means of sustaining something that would otherwise dissolve.

Romanticisation, for me, is not a form of escape, but a way of working. It is a process of intensifying what is already slipping, allowing colour, softness, and material excess to hold something in place a little longer. To romanticise is to give form to what is slipping: not to preserve it as it was, but to allow it to remain in another state, altered yet still felt.

I am not trying to resolve these conditions. Instead, I work within and with them, holding onto the moment where something is still becoming, where it can be felt but not entirely known.

I do not seek to define ambiguity; I work alongside it.