Industrial Bodies

Through the lens of post-coloniality and nostalgia, man-made objects are a means to explore Buddhist theories of attachment. I utilize collection, transplanting, altering, recategorization and recontextualization as methodologies to interrogate the attachment of place, meaning, and nostalgia to object and material. Nostalgia and a sense of history in place enables us, as multicultural residents in a post-colonial country, to subjectivize the found objects into a new kind of post-colonial subject.

The wearables are variable in their practicality and require the audience to handle (literally grappling with) them in order to understand how they might be worn. The hand-fabricated chain, bails, chimes, and other less-practical accessories give clues as to how the pieces might be worn, while others serve as red herrings. The challenge and potential discomfort of wearing the objects invokes thoughts of suffering and attachment in the wearer. I hope the wearer might reconsider themselves in terms of their identity when wearing these pieces.

This collection strives to reconcile what are becoming two distinct streams within my work – the socio-cultural stream of identity, nostalgia, and post-coloniality, and the spiritual-psychological stream of attachment, suffering, transcendence, and immanence.