‘Seeds and Stones’ is a multi-layered visual art and aural experience. The installation explores themes of loss, transformation and renewal in light of Tanglin Halt’s impending demolition and redevelopment. Clips of buildings in Queenstown are overlaid with fractal, Rorschach-like imagery of cranes with their spindly claws extended, twisting out towards the buildings. Sequences of giant trees and buildings being felled are interspersed with archival film footage depicting moments in the ordinary lives of residents – neighbourhood kids hunched over some shared mischief, playing five stones and trying to jump rope. The use of visual layering creates the textural effect of residents watching, almost impassively, their houses slow-gliding to destruction.
The artist’s own fluid, sinuous and expressive movements are integrated within the work, the calligraphy of her long limbs drifting, swirling and curling with emotion. Her dance sequences are rendered in shimmering, phosphorescent light silhouettes, carefully stacked and layered over each other to dreamy, mesmerising effect.
The haunting, fragmented soundscape is a product of the artist’s interactions with, and interpretations of, the people and natural environment in Queenstown. The artist blends a rhythmic drumming pattern of saga (love) seeds indigenous to the area with excerpts of recorded interviews with Alice, a resident and community leader in Tanglin Halt, to create intricate polyphonic textures unique to the neighbourhood. The sonic reinterpretation of the interviewee’s familiar but disembodied and deconstructed Singaporean accent also captures and offers an insight into the way Singaporean accents sound to foreigners.
Each element of the installation thus provides the Singaporean viewer with a novel, unexpected opportunity to understand and confront their own perspectives and understandings of home.
