Together Again (Wood:Cut) Background
by Lucy Davis
Together Again (Wood:Cut) is a homage to the form and context of the Malayan modern woodcut movement, recast in a context of contemporary ecological destruction and 'cuttings of wood'. The project is an inquiry into relationships between peoples and trees in Southeast Asia and the 'secret lives' of rainforest products - explored as material metaphor, magic, ecological resource and historical agent.
One starting point for the Together Again (Wood:Cut) series is a deep reverence for the form and the content of the mid-twentieth century Singapore woodcut movement. I started this project knowing only that I wanted to work through the medium of the Singapore modern woodcut in a context of Southeast Asian ecological crisis and macro-scale 'cuttings of wood'.
I initially wanted to make contemporary work through the medium of modern woodblock and began by researching the modern woodcut movement and interviewing woodcut artists such as Lim Yew Kuan. However, I quickly discovered that practically all of the wood prepared and sold commercially as art materials in Singapore derives from endangered rainforests. In particular, the wood marketed for woodblock printmaking is made from jelutong - a now endangered forest wood from Malaysia and Indonesia.
At the time I was living on Perumal Road in Little India and I was reminded everyday by the amount of readily available, discarded timber on street corners of the quarter. This wood was not yet (as is the case with cardboard and tin) prized by karang guni rag and bone collectors and therefore not yet integrated into the highly competitive, informal recycling economy or 'nocturnal ecology' for which Little India has become renowned.
I began to go out at night with a trolley, together with my partner, collecting wooden planks and items I found on the street and with the intention of using these as the basis of woodblock prints. I became curious to know how the wood had migrated to Little India and was interested in the parallels between the migration of objects and the migration of humans to Singapore.
Colleagues a the National University of Singapore put me in touch with Double Helix Tracking Technologies (DHTT), a startup company specializing in DNA-tracking construction timber in order to certify that wood is from legal rather than illegal rainforest sources. DHTT have, for example, DNA-certified the timber used in the construction of a number of large-scale public projects in Singapore including the recent Terminal 3 at Changi International Airport.
Each individual tree has a unique DNA identity, and although trees actually have 60-110 times more DNA genetic information than humans, with usual anthropomorphic arrogance they are deemed to have a 'DNA thumbprint'. With DNA tracking it is possible to ascertain from which location in the region commercial timber species have originated and thereby whether timber is from legal plantation, or illegal rainforest trees.
My original intention was to test all the wooden objects I had collected in order to inscribe a route that they might have travelled to Singapore into the wood - a record of the journey combining with the grain of the objects themselves. But after bringing these objects (mostly domestic items: a stool, a rolling pin, a collection box, a table base) into my home, I found that I had just become too fond of them. I could not do violence to them. I needed to respect their integrity - as objects.
Together Again (Wood:Cut) Part I. NATURAL HISTORY was displayed at Post Museum exhibition space Singapore in May 2009. The exhibition contained ink imprints of the objects I had found on paper - a sort of naïve, primitive-positivist attempt to press the print up as close to the real object as possible. These black and white prints were displayed in the decontextualized format of natural history specimens, alongside meticulous, handwritten, fictive and documentary stories/taxonomies in Malay and Latin, for example:
Sinensis sella quattuor hominis fora seduti operto capite ex obsoletarum rerum venditore cumque nigro cane in via Kampung Kapoor. 'Four-legged terentang stool from the karang guni man with the black hat and black dog who sit on the corner of Kampung Kapoor.'
Together Again (Wood:Cut) Part I. (NATURAL HISTORY) also involved attempts, together with Double Helix Tracking Technologies and Shawn Lum a biologist and President of the Nature Society of Singapore, to locate living examples of the trees from which the objects originated. What followed were necessary clumsy endeavours to put the trees, from which the objects came, back 'together again' - entirely from cut-up prints of the objects themselves. This involved projecting a 'spirit' or what the Malay woodcarvers might call the semangkat of the wood objects onto trees themselves as much as it involved imagining a spirit of the tree in the object. Source: migrantecologies.org
No comments:
Post a Comment