With “Redgate”, I want to be understood, to distil and make whiskey from dew. It meant a deeper engagement with language about a place my heart is fond of and what we might become when we work together.
Bogotá Feathers
The trampled feathers found in any city street around the world are a metaphor, or a trace of the beauty and the life that turns grey beneath our feet because we are so used to walking through the same streets every day that we become oblivious or desensitized to what is around us.
I want a love that burns the skies
but all you want is to dive deeper
into the ocean.
Moving past wild trees, feet covered in wet mud, every now and then she looks up to the sky, following the rays of the sun, praying she is not lost.
Stopped at a red light after class; we see Lake Erie.
All the life it holds trembling in its dark, still palm:
the yellow perch, the walleye.
The kite swoops in on the unsuspecting birds and the subsequent action attempts to simulate van Gogh’s painting style, one typified by energy, speed and dynamism. The constant maintenance of the zoomed out perspective sustains the viewer’s engagement as if one was watching van Gogh paint this scene.
I have known many great rivers in this world. I have known the Tigris and the Euphrates, fallopian cradle to human civilisation. I have traversed the vertiginous lengths of the Iguazu and the Parana, as they discharge the untamed heart of South America into frigid waste seas at the end of the world.
Garden State Palimpsest
Garden State Palimpsest explores Singapore's constantly changing landscape and its residents' relationship with the land.
We called him Cubbie
Because he was found in a cupboard
in my in-laws’ driveway.
Singapore intimidated me what with long-declared dogma that any personages caught chewing gum—which was banned after vandals had mucked up sidewalks and keyholes and mailboxes and railway doors—
The birds are conspiring again.
An open field means an open agenda,
collusion with the sky.
My mind raced to all the flora and fauna in the world. What if they were dissatisfied with how they looked and tried to be something else? Mutilate their feathers, chop off their rhino beaks or bleed themselves to be redder and louder than their pale petals? Would not an entire species go extinct?
Dead wings or living feathers,
he counts them in flight
against skies wrung with pastels
and traffic babble. Black-naped orioles
are yellow pips in tree-stubble.
Conflicted
By experimenting with differing combinations and possibilities that each material presents, my works offer the audience possible narratives and ways in which to look at and think about the relationship between man and nature.
Desires, fears, surprises, illusions
chop-chop-chop
sold for rupee, dollar or pound.
They all cost the same.