the story of calico
UltraSuperNew Gallery, Singapore
14 Jan to 28 Jan 2022

About the Exhibition

the story of calico marks the official launch of the Critical Craft Collective Singapore, an initiative started by Adeline Kueh and Hazel Lim to investigate the relationships between craft and contemporary art, design and new technologies. 

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the story of calico foregrounds the different ideals and notions of nurturing and care away from traditional (gendered) norms. For this exhibition, we seek to highlight and elevate the materiality of calico as the main material due to its humble relationship to colonial trade routes and to reclaim its role in today’s context. The selection of intergenerational artists - from more established to emerging whose practices focus on craft, foreground the crafting elements, techniques, intangible/marginal positioning, narratives and storytelling - are important to The story of calico as we reclaim certain themes around intimacy and distance, domesticity in light of the pandemic, and repetitive gestures of ‘becoming’. The range of works made by these artists and a writer include material & haptic manipulations, formal/abstract works dealing with the relationship of calico and image making, representational works that re-examine the politics of location and decolonial approaches, aspects of upcycling or recycling and mending. 

 

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About Notations

Notations by Hazel Lim is inspired by the excesses and off-cuts from garment patterns. These modular and stacked pieces of calico sculptures are spliced with other coloured cotton pieces to emulate the scraps often discarded from the off-cuts of apparel-making. Each layer of the fabric is hand-cut and then stacked into a block of its own, where the artist liken the scraps to have gained their own ‘weight’ by being transformed into an object. The sculptures are thoughtfully arranged to connotate a visual sound/rhythm, as is the choice of colours that accompany the raw neutral tones of the calico. The shadows are vibrations that further the abstractions of these small blocks, giving one a sense of a visual score.

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Links: 

Review by Durva Simone Bose for Tatler Singapore March 2022: A Stitch in Time

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Review by 黄向京  for Zaobao: 棉里藏针也埋史 白棉布的故事展

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Photo credits: Nel Lim