To call something ornamental is to already have made a judgement. It means the thing has been evaluated and found wanting: decorative rather than functional. But this verdict tends to have been taken for granted, pre-loaded into the language we […]
I would call myself a collector. I have a hard time letting go of trinkets, memories, and people. My bedroom walls are covered in photos, collages, notes, and drawings… The first thing I do when I move into a new place is decorate my room with the physical manifestation of my memories.
The world of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, while very different from our world 101 years later, was still a fractured and difficult time—a time that could be made bearable through embracing ornament. My piece is a digital dungeon that can be decorated through finding parts of architectural ornamentation circa 1925.
Each flower in Passing Blooms was “picked” from a New Yorker’s attire and recreated as a hand-embroidered piece. The “herbarium” collects all 15 flowers in the series, and includes each flower’s number, location, and date of collection. Photos of the 15 passersby the flowers were “picked from” are also included.
Along major roads in Accra and in towns across Ghana, small roadside tire-repair shops operate from makeshift structures… these shops —locally known as vulcanizers—repair punctures, patch inner tubes, and replace worn tires for bicycles, taxis, buses, motorbikes, and cargo trucks moving through the city each day.
Have you ever experienced that moment when, once you start noticing something, the world suddenly mirrors it back at you everywhere? This was that moment—when I realised the uncanny truth of my surroundings. I am standing in a graveyard of countless Christmas used-to-be-trees…
Toward the center of the hand there is a small rise, a swelling of acrylic, an early presentiment playfully given for the presence of the piece. Closer to it, the bevel of chrome’s edge catches the light; a milky translucence breaks into embedded glitter; the cuticle line is sealed as if it were a seam. When the finger turns, the surface turns with it; mirror, then bruise, then pearl.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when #Brasilipinas deu à luz to this imagined community or vice versa. Through the hashtag it’s about a couple of years old… where Brazilians and Filipinos stake their affinities and alliances: we’re amigos, siblings, even cousins (“Filiprimos”).
While tracing the tiny orders
within digital seams,
a word from 1970s Japan
kept returning to me—
Harahara Tokei.
Recently, I produced a series of sculptural masses that appear to float in a void. These objects were not made to function as sculpture in any traditional sense. From the outset, they were conceived as production props for the camera and the screen: objects that exist temporarily in order to complete a photograph.