Unravelled Gathering (The Sea, The Rope)
Talbot Rice Gallery, 2024

A lead line is a device for measuring the depth of the water and is one of the oldest of all navigating tools. Marks made of leather, calico, serge and other materials are often attached at intervals along the rope so it is possible to "read" them by eye during the day or by feel at night. 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 Sea, The Rope,  the Heat, and The Fingers Pulling the Thread is an episodic project imagined as a cumulative form that spans across sculpture, sound, performance, writing and community involvement.

The work considered maritime knowledge systems that are grounded by weights and measures, such as the deep-sea practice of using rope divided into fathoms to measure the depth of water. Looking at rope as a signifier and representation of complex histories of empire and labour, this work also gestures to the Samsui women. These were impoverished Chinese immigrants seeking employment in the British colonies between the 1920s and 1940s and ended up working in construction industries.
This piece was shown at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh and Mimosa House, London in early 2024. 

A textile and sound work that references a dyeing technique from Guangdong, gambiered silk, using mud and ju-liang, a medicinal root to impart a distinct brown to the fabric. This specific mud-dyeing technique of the gambiered silk uses iron-rich mud from the Pearl River Delta. The significance of this is that people would carry the land with them through the clothing they wore even if they had left their homes. 

This piece was shown at Edinburgh Arts Festival in August 2024. Read more