between oceans, 2020 – 2021.
Installation: postcards on voile, six inkjet prints on matte photo paper and sound recording.
The work was previously exhibited in February 2021 at The Walls Art Space in Miami, Gold Coast, as a part of ANTHEM ARI’s first group exhibition RATIONAL IDENTITY.
Image credit: Lucy Nguyễn-Hunt. Courtesy the artist.
Please see this link for photographic prints.
between oceans is a collection of 22 postcards sent from a father to a mother and a daughter over 22 years of life, sewn into a piece of sheer fabric, accompanied by a series of six photographs of performative actions shot in coastal New South Wales. Sent from places around the world including Japan, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Australia and the United States, the postcards are small reminders of thoughts, sweet prayers and love. between oceans is a reminder of the many distances that stand between us, distances between oceans, between borders and between families. Yet it is also a reminder of how familial love traverses these spaces and how these tenuous bonds may be stretched, pulled and blown in the wind, but never broken.
Accompanying the work is all things left unsaid, a performance and sound score of recordings collected by the artist. These include a bi-lingual poem, music recorded by Takeuchi, and field recordings of water. The poem is a collaborative reading between Takeuchi and her mother, which code-switches between Japanese and English. The text is an homage to the experiences shared by the artist and her family, including recollections of trips to local pools, bodies of water and an earthquake that took place while their family was in Tokyo. The recording ends with a segment of a song written by the artist about the idea of ‘home’ and longing for homeland.
Artist statement, “The voile and cards act as an ephemeral ode, my own makeshift prayer flags that have remained tucked away between books, pinned onto walls and locked away in drawers until last year when travel between distances abruptly ceased. The postcards have become relics of my tiny universes caressed and nurtured by many hands. It has been really formative to revisit some of these experiences, especially when there’s been distances enforced upon families due to border restrictions. The work has been so far, for me, a space to recollect memories and an ode to how familial love can potentially extend across boundaries.”
I performed between oceans, all things left unsaid for the first time as a part of Anthem ARI’s first exhibition project. The ARI formed out of Covid-19, and was a way for us to talk through and build a new pathway forward for our intersectional art practices. This pathway and group was a way for us to articulate our stories, our histories, and to shine a light on submerged BIPOC narratives coming out of Meanjin (Brisbane). It began as a way of extending tenderness to one another and map together our different yet similar cross-cultural experiences.
In a way, the performance, with a soundscape I created using text from each of the five Anthem co-members (including myself), was its own kind of Anthem, a homage to all of the submerged narratives between us, all of the things we leave ‘unsaid’. Personally, for me, it was about mapping traces of histories, distances, finding togetherness, extending tenderness across physical and metaphorical boundaries.
Questions and thoughts that arose for me…
how to articulate the nuances of these cultural stories
how to map distances through physical movement
how to stay true to the dialogue, the evocative words
what takes place when transporting a work from one setting to another?
how does the narrative bridge into the movement and vice versa?
Because we had artist talks and a panel discussion prior to the performance, the work became a way of concluding, a way of mapping all the discussion that came before. It brought all the themes together and brought an understanding between the artists and audience members. It shone light on possibilities moving forward as a collective.
