​Halway through my collaboration with Denise Schellmann  and we are having a blast! Denise is an artist from Vienna who is doing her artist residency with Instinc in Singapore. It was just wonderful to find ourselves so much in sync regarding our attitude towards art making and the role art plays in our lives.
Since Denise's is a drawing based practice I seized the chance to develop my own drawing working with her. We were both attracted to tracing paper as a drawing medium and so we bought rolls and pads of it and set to work.

In the first week or so we explored each other's ways of working. For example Denise started with working on 3D drawing and I started with markmaking on paper. But soon I couldn't help but crumple the paper in search of texture in the material of the paper itself. The texture experiments continued for a while – I added wax (and some other materials as well) and experimented with different weights of tracing paper (example image on the  right). 
But then i needed to mould the paper some more and see how much I could do with it. A variety of scupltures in several sizes and shapes and that's how these forms were born.

​While I was texturing and sculpting with tracing paper, Denise moved back to drawing on flat paper but  her use of colour and mark-making expanded and she also started drawing on a much larger scale. 
​A month into the collaboration we had both developed a solid body of studies (and Denise even had some finished works) that we felt we could take forward. However we felt that there was a lot to be gained from embracing the challenge of merging what we had developed into the same work. This was not easy. Every artist has her unique style, like a handwriting and trying to merge 2 different styles into the same work was initially challenging. I had to modify my textures considerably and she had to make her marks a lot bolder. But we are now at the stage where we are quite thrilled with what we are developing. The final work will take the form of an installation where we are literally "drawing into space". Many thanks to Alexis Butt at the Affordable Art Fair who has been very supportive of our endeavour in allowing us a prominent space to exhibit our installation at AAF this November.  This will be followed by a  two-person show at Instinc. (More details in subsequent blogs)

The work for the exhibition was derived from another work I had done last year in a residency context at BigCi (photograph on the right). Adapting a site specific work to a gallery context was an interesting challenge. 

Why Dead Plants?

This work was done during a November 2014 artist residency at BigCI (otherwise known as Bilpin International Ground for Creative Initiatives). BigCI is located at the edge of the Wollemi National Park (part of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area in Australia). I was told that this part of the world has the largest variety of flora in the world after the Amazon Basin. I would walk for hours in the “bush” (Australian for forest) soaking in the natural beauty of the area, often stopping to sit on a rock to sketch or write something in my sketchbook. On one of these walks, some dead plants wedged between tall grass and shrubs caught my eye. They just lay there almost invisible amongst the amazing vegetation that grew all around them. Fascinated by their fragile unique beauty I took them back to the studio and started studying them through drawing.

After that day, every time I was outdoors I started noticing more and more of the dead plants. Their woody rhythmic shapes, the forms of their leaves, pods and branches all fascinated me. The very fact that I often trod on them as I navigated my way through the bush brought home the humility and fate of these amazing creations of nature.
 
Every walk ended with me bringing more of these plants back to the studio. I laid them out before me on the floor and the tables and suspended them in the air. I wanted to see them in their uniqueness –freeing the forms from the clutter of an abundant forest. 

Cycles of Life

Working in this way I pondered the ultimate destiny of my dead plants- to be absorbed back into the earth from which they had grown. Yet in their ceasing to exist they would provide nourishment to the next generation of forest undergrowth and even the tall trees of the bush. 

The nature of life is cyclical whether it is plants or humans. I thought of the floral veils that are used to decorate a bridal home in India. The fragrance and colour of the flowers are intrinsic to the bridal festivities. Yet on the day after the wedding when the bride leaves her parent’s home and goes to her husband’s house these flowers are already wilting. As the floral veil is taken down to be thrown away there is a melancholy associated with the act of saying adieu to a daughter or sister. But even in the midst of this sorrow one looks forward to happier events around the corner as she embarks upon a new life. Influenced by memories of floral veils, the work took on the form of a veil. 

The Urban Veil

One of the dictionary definitions of a veil is “something that conceals, separates or screens”. A city dweller often views the natural world on a handphone, a computer or the television. Even when we get closer there is often a camera lens or a car window that separates us from nature. All these “screens” conceal from us our connection to the natural world. How often are we able to enter into natural surroundings and know ourselves again as a part of it?