Artist’s Statement

Context has everything to do with my work. Living on a small island known for its sun, sand and sea; my concerns are about how specific environment can be viewed as therapeutic space while nature presents us with the impermanence, death and decay . 
Sea shells have always fascinated and comforted me. There is strangeness in those complex shapes and structures that I would like to have people to react to; and also the issue about inside and outside; void and weight but also about perception and intuitive memory. I am hence investigating on its expressive potential while contemplating these as objects.

Recently, my father has suffered two strokes and is bedridden. While being fully involved on emotional geography and experience, my work overlaps with aspects of remembering, understanding,belonging, fear of loss, healing and cleansing. I have explored the tactile relationships with materials as a deliberate soothing process. I have finally settled for block-carving for I find it to be conducive to a meditative process where decision, action, and appraisal become fused in a fluid working dialogue. 
My work revolves around the aspects of presence and absence. I have used soap as material as it suggests domestic regard and is also the ordinary object to be picked up and handled; reminiscent of the past handling of the shells. By working though it, its primary function changes from cleaning to cleansing. The viewer will be allowed to touch the work leading to a chain of connection between the self, destruction and the ephemeral. 
The little soap sculptures represent a self-documentation process; a personal museum of feelings and guarded memories. The work has been named "English Bay- Rodrigues Island...2004-2006" to commemorate the past when I was living near the sea with connotations of the colonial periods which the islands of the Indian Ocean; Mauritius and Rodrigues, have endured.