Alaya Ang
Unravelled Gathering (The Rope)
Talbot Rice Residents 16 Mar - 31 May 2024
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
Unravelled Gathering explores the entanglements of migration and labour drawing connections between familial ties, maritime journeys, and movement across water. The work references the histories of the Samsui women, Chinese female migrants who arrived in British Malaya between the 1920s and 1940s, undertaking strenuous labour in construction and industry. Their resilience and toil remain embedded in the infrastructures of the region.
Responding to the practice of using lead lines to measure water depth, a method historically employed in navigation, the work replaces these weighted ties with ceramic bangles, referencing roof tiles and zodiac reliefs linked to Alaya’s family lineage. The maroon-dyed rope could symbolise an umbilical cord that is a connection to ancestral matrilineages while moon blocks (traditional divination objects) serve as conduits for divine knowledge and unseen forces shaping migration paths.
The nautical unit of measurement for the depth of water is in ‘fathom’, from the Old Norse word, fathmr, for “outstretched arms” that was standardized at six-feet. Responding to this practice of depth measuring, the series of cast ceramic tubes contains imagery of zodiac animals from Alaya’s family intermingled with motifs of the landscape, clouds, mountains and sea. Wax castings of feet in their suspended state, held at sharp angles, create a flow of choreography that forms a material link to Alaya’s family who are tailors, conveying the image of arched feet over treadles of sewing machines and to Samsui women, a group of Chinese female immigrants who came to Malaya and Singapore between the 1920s and 40s, who did manual hard labour similar to coolies.
The moon blocks, made out of wood, carved into a crescent shape are a divination tool frequently used by Alaya’s grandmother when requesting an answer from the divine. The gathering of objects become intimate geometries of sustained spiritual and familial links, they are all forms of attachment to be done and undone, their symbolic configuration looking like relatives in conversation with each other.
The gathering of objects forms an intimate geometry of spiritual and familial connections, where the symbolic configurations function like knots—markers of attachment, endurance, and the continual process of being bound and unbound. Through this constellation of materials, Unravelled Gathering engages with the interwoven narratives of migration, ecology, and the unseen forces that have shape the lived experiences of those who move across waters.
Read Artist Guide
Writings from James Clegg and Kandace Siobhan Walker
Photo credit: Najma Abukar
Special thanks to Robyn Walsh for their assistance on ceramic roof tile tube, and to technicians at Edinburgh College of Art.
This work is the first part of a longer-term project The Sea, the Heat, The Rope and The Fingers Pulling the Thread, a series of work that investigates matrilineal and genderqueer genealogies. Each cumulative form is an invitation to relationality by meandering through different material discoveries and processes.