Project: Eden
Project: Eden | 2007
- Size
- 23 x 4 x 4.3 m
- Medium
- Cleaning equipment, metal shipping containers, wooden staircase, railings, dustbins, plastic grass, mirror, etc.
- Exhibition
- Raffles City, Singapore Arts Festival (2007), Singapore | Singapore Season China (12 Oct - 10 Nov 2007), “Hybricity: Singapore”, Beijing, China | City Link, Tickle Art, Singapore
Ironically, though Singapore is known as the garden city – rows of beautiful trees and shrubs line every street In Singapore - 70% of the population live in HDB flats where the space constraints of sky-rise living do not allow for private gardens. However, the desire for a garden does not abate despite the difficulty of realisation. The Bonsai gardens, corridor/balcony gardens, and even the bottle gardens that many flat-dwellers own, may with a pinch of salt, be read as expression of this longing.
Personally, my desire for an individual garden was further fanned by Singapore’s emphasis on the English language. Through the act of reading foreign storybooks, I became familiar with the culture, climate and landscape of a land not my own. I longed to see and play within the storybook gardens of snowdrops, buttercups and apple trees
In this particular work, an English wild garden, remembered from childhood storybooks is remade from the mundane miscellaneous flotsam found around the Singaporean house. Toilet brushes, balloon sticks and cups, sponges and lily brushes metamorphose into weird hybrid flowers and grasses through creative arranging and a little imagination.