Indéfiniment/
2019–2020


/Indéfiniment/
is a meditation on the primordial ocean that has been the very holding site of all life forms. ‘Indéfiniment’ utilises the affinity that we share with the ocean to capture the liminality between arrival and departure whose lines are often blurred. For even though the water has once sustained and nurtured us, we could no longer live in full compatibility with it in its unmediated state–a contradiction that drew the artist towards the site of the ocean.



Imbued with personal narratives that is a meditation of the artist’s immediate world, the otherworldly dimensions recreated by the artist here details her struggle as she attempts to reconcile with the role and identity that she has to play in this world that she inhabits through the absolute magnitude of the ocean.

/Indéfiniment/
One of the reasons as to why man looks at nature has always been closely tied to how the site of “nature” reminds them of a far more primitive time just as Cicero wrote in ‘De natura deorum’

"We sow corn, we plant trees, we fertilise the soil by irrigation, we dam the rivers and direct them where we want. In short, by means of our hands we try to create as it were a second nature within the natural world.”

Implying at the fact that a ‘First nature’ which is that of the nature and wilderness–that has been the model to which we attempt to redefine.

Yet, when we think about our ‘first nature’ in line with the biophilia hypothesis that Edward O. Wilson introduced and popularised in his book Biophilia (1984) that suggests how human possesses an innate tendency to seek connections with nature and other forms of life as a hypothetical product of biological evolution. I can’t help but to draw the connection to my background where both of my parent’s immediate family resides in Indonesia. As a result, I have always spent a long time out at sea since I was young just getting about to different places as I visited next of kins such as my grandparents whom all resided in Kundur Island within the Riau Archipelago that was a three-hour ferry ride away from the island of Singapore.

Although I had probably hated these rides just as any fidgety kid would have, this shared affinity that I have with it would come to influence me in my teens and in the subsequent years as I found my feet by the sea every so often.

Warm and welcoming at times when I needed a breather on my own.

The site and sight of the sea also takes on a cold, static and unmoving character as the years passes by where separation and departure became one of the things that would grow to be more and more intrinsically tied to its mere sight.

“…For there shall be no more pain, nor sorrow for the former things has passed on.” I remember thinking so as I looked out from the passenger seat during my grandfather’s demise.

I thought to myself there and then.

Of sorrow, of warmth.

The primordial ocean was at once our holding place before the evolution of man from a planktonic state to our current stature.

Yet the contradictory nature would also be the fact that whilst it nurtures and sustains us in highly mediated state. We do not live-in compatibility with it in its full glory which prompts me to draw at this precise hypothesis that it is this contradiction that drew me in to the character of the sea.

In our earliest, most primitive state we were simply mere planktonic creatures living in the waters.

Yet, it has since, been reduced to a mere sight that simply wavers between cognition and unfamiliarity for us.

The character of the sea—one that is deeply intertwined with the idea of familiarity as much as separation thereby lies within the work as an uncanny setting that lays out the spatial context of the work where the audience are invited to meditate upon the narratives that are embedded within the photographs.