Artist Statement
 

My practice begins with the garden as a metaphor for identity. I do not see identity as something fixed or complete. Like a garden, it is continuously cultivated. Things are planted, removed and rearranged. Some parts are inherited. Others are chosen. New experiences take root while older ones fade or return in unexpected forms.

Every person tends a different garden. Each one develops according to its own conditions, memories and desires. Drawing from Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time, I am interested in the garden as a place where time does not move in a straight line. Growth exists alongside decay. The past remains present while the future is still taking shape.

I think of each artwork as a flower plucked from my own garden. It begins with a feeling, memory or question that I want to understand at a particular moment. Making allows me to remove that fragment from an internal and shifting space. I can then examine it by giving it physical form.

Once completed, the artwork holds that moment in place while I continue to change. Months or years later, I may no longer feel or understand it in the same way. The work becomes a fragment of an earlier self. It acts as both a record and a time capsule.

Craft is central to this process. I work across tufting, beadwork, stained glass and other materially led techniques. These processes require touch, patience and sustained attention. They allow an intangible experience to acquire weight, texture, colour and form.

A physical object also creates a direct relationship with the viewer. It occupies space and changes through light, distance and movement. It can be approached through the body rather than understood only as an image. Through materiality, something that began as an internal experience becomes present in a world shared with others.

My use of botanical forms and ornament also draws from visual languages connected to Singapore, Southeast Asia and East Asia. I do not treat these references as fixed symbols. Instead, I allow them to be selected, altered and replanted within the work. They become part of an evolving garden through which I reflect on memory, cultural inheritance and the shifting construction of the self.