Personal family photographs from childhood are my starting point. The source images are selected because I find the group composition particularly compelling or because they document my family’s witness to political and cultural events. However, whilst these images are personal or politically loaded, the final painting is generally very different, and concerns of making, materials and meaning come to the fore. I assemble my work through a process of deconstruction and reframing to question how such images are seen and interpreted. I work primarily in oil on canvas and make mixed media works using paint and print media and collage. My paintings evolve in series and become distanced from their source imagery, allowing for a new comprehension of the surreal experience of remembrance.
Born in Thailand, now living in Chichester, West Sussex, Sylvia, a British-Singaporean, grew up and worked between South-East Asia and the UK. Her work addresses concepts of memory, culture, history, and her own personal experiences with identity. She paints ambivalent, theatrical figures in indeterminate or disjointed spaces, to explore notions of belonging. Often using personal photographs as source material, her art combines abstraction and figuration, merging unstable ideas of memory and temporal and cultural identities.
In 2023, she was selected for the Contemporary Art Collectors’ Emerging Artist Programme and her work was selected for the Jackson’s Painting Prize exhibition at Bankside Gallery, London, and for the Women in Art Fair 2023 at the Mall Galleries, London. Her work was awarded an Honourable Mention in the Contemporary Expressions Award 2023. She was also longlisted for the British Contemporary Painting Prize 2023. Sylvia is currently pursuing an MFA at West Dean College.
Bio.
My figurative paintings capture the fleeting strangeness and unreliability of childhood memory. In my work, I combine disjointed imagery in an interplay between naturalism and abstraction. I contend with contradictions around experience, the fragile nature of memories, and how they affect my shifting temporal and cultural self. I reflect on childhood, how family relationships inform our identity, often subverting the mother-child bond to create unsettling versions of the theme. There is a sense of nostalgia, of holding time and configuring my history, but the bright and pastel tonalities of my palette belie a disconnection between the spaces as well as the people, often presented as ambivalent, theatrical enigmas.
Whilst my work is partly autobiographical, the results are open to responses that are both personal and universal, inviting the viewer to move into a space of speculation. Through the process of painting, the exploration of personal history and fragmented memory, my work reflects an archive, through which I find a hybrid identity revealing the complexity of contemporary experience.