Applying to the workshop as my last semester of the final year of university came to an end
felt like a coping mechanism to keep going, keep on making work and engage with a
community who had the same passion for creation.
On the first few days of the workshop, we were challenged to come up with a common ground that connected our practices. It wasn’t that hard to understand that we as artists are very colour-driven and we were all going through journeys of our own that have come together as we coloured up the space at Arcadia with ‘Traversing’. As different as our experiences are, I found myself thinking of home.
In one of our activities in preparation of the concept of the exhibition I wrote on my sketchbook: ‘As an immigrant it is common to try to find a sense of belonging, a journey to find what we leave behind.’
For a while now, my work has focused on this concept of ‘home’ and how it shifts, it was
really interesting to get this open window view into my fellow artists’ culture, stories and sense of home and navigate this new challenge together as we all pushed our practices forward with Roo’s much appreciated help.
In short, this workshop not only allowed me to keep going, as it gave me an incredible group
of creatives to explore it with and somehow even managed to make me feel closer to home.
It was perhaps the most rewarding challenge I’ve encountered yet, to produce artwork in such a short span of time and push the way of showcasing it to a much bigger scale, perhaps a good analogy to how big a home can be when we start to connect the homes we make for ourselves in each part of the globe.
‘The greatest journeys are the ones that take you home’, indeed.