2024, United Kingdom
Come as you are, as you were
Wood, handmade paper, satin photo paper, rice paper, tracing paper, string, nails, tape, wood dust
60 × 79.5 inch, size variant
Exhibited in Keep in Touch, 3rdwrld x Broken Englizh, Greenwich West Community & Arts Centre, London
RCA 2024 Sculpture MA, School of Arts & Humanities postgraduate exhibition, London
Festus: SCULPT, LIFT: The Movement (presented by RCA sculpture), LIFT Studio, London
In my most recent work, “Come as you are, as you were,” objects with ambiguous shapes are scattered across a blank space. Utilizing materials such as wood, handmade paper, satin photo paper, tracing paper, string, nails, tape, wood dust, photographs, and words, I explore mark-making on wood and its original properties. Each fragment is an offcut, part of a larger whole, now dispersed yet unified by a shared history. These leftover pieces represent the surplus of the creator's thoughts, much like words that were once exiled fragments. My obsession lies in these ever-expanding, uncertain, and fluid fragments—they are restless and floating, much like myself.
Photography serves as a medium for archiving ephemeral moments. Inspired by Robert Morris’s "Continuous Project Altered Daily" (1970), my work emphasizes preserving personal narratives and revealing the past. It creates evidence of existence, capturing moments destined to fade away. I engage with materials, objects, and forms that are inherently unstable, reflecting the audience's interaction and the passage of time. This dynamic allows my work to evolve, remaining fragile and challenging to preserve or view straightforwardly. My sculptures resist being defined from a single perspective, continually engulfing words that attempt to categorize them.
Writing is a crucial aspect of my practice, not because I aspire to be a writer, but because it helps me navigate my thoughts and emotions. Writing is a process of returning to the self, giving attention to myself. As I accumulate my writings, recurring themes emerge, prompting me to organize them into a book. This act of compiling my thoughts is an exercise in self-reflection, delving into my trauma and emotions to uncover hidden aspects. In the preface of my book, I note: "This book is an excerpt of scattered words by a narrator. These words have touched emotion, fantasy, dreams, unsettled lines of sight, gazes, memories, and obsessions in multiple temporal spaces. This book is an attempt to organize the exiled words and visions." Revisiting and organizing these once-avoided writings into a public book is a form of self-healing, reclaiming marginalized thoughts.
The vulnerability in my writings complements my series of nude portraits, while the rediscovered words resonate with my landscape photography. In my landscape series, I explore unfamiliar spaces, capturing moments while being perceived as an outsider. In my book, I write: "Photography resists language; people seek meaning from images due to the unsettledness of consciousness... The relationship between exile and being exiled is ambiguous, as if you expect me to speak, but I remain silent." When we cannot define what is in a photograph, our consciousness is exiled to a floating status quo that expects to fall to one end. Photography's inherent uncertainty creates a space where the inability to express 'self' becomes a form of freedom and openness. This medium allows for a unique interplay between "self" and "world," navigating the continuous process of exile and return. The act of photographing transforms subjective experiences into objective records, yet the process remains deeply personal, driven by the desire to capture fleeting moments. Photography, thus, resists the constraints of language, offering an open and uncertain space for both the photographer and the viewer.
Though my sculptures, like my photography, resist being defined by language, they are engendered by words, texts, and photos. They are tangible objects essential to my practice. Wood, with its rigidity and irreversible nature once cut, allows me to explore form three-dimensionally. Inspired by these leftover pieces, I also create a table, shifting from personal narrative to a free-form, ephemeral landscape. The wood pieces weave a web for personal discourse, creating a space for me to land. Each fragment, part of a larger whole, is now dispersed yet unified by a shared history and desire for connection.