CLEANSE: When Cleaning Becomes an Act of Care, Control and Resistance - Asia Pacific Now
2026 - PRESTIGE GALLERY - Singapore
CURATORS:
- Desmond Mah
- Adrian Tan
VENUE:
- Prestige Gallery, Tanjong Pagar Distripark - 39 Keppel Road, #03-01 - Singapore 089065
WORKS IN EXHIBITION:
- Cyanotype on coloured cotton fabric - Hopscotch Series II
Dimensions: Variable
The Labour We Inherit
The Hopscotch Series II uses cyanotypes to create marks on coloured cotton fabric framed in embroidery hoops. Each piece carries traces of bodies, objects, and gestures, transforming the photographic document into a tactile, domestic object saturated with the history of women's labour.
The cyanotype process itself is an act of inscription through light: exposing, developing, and washing. What remains is what resists being washed away. The fabric becomes both photographic surface and textile archive, holding impressions the way cloth holds memory—through wear, through touch, through the residue of use.
Framed in embroidery hoops, the works invoke the gendered space of domestic craftsmanship and the invisible labour of maintenance. The title references the childhood game of hopscotch—a structure of bounded spaces, rules for navigation, and a dance between order and play. This framework mirrors how the work operates: each piece is a discrete territory, yet together they create a constellation that can be endlessly reconfigured, responding to the architecture of each space they inhabit.
The series asks: what survives the wash? What traces remain after the process of cleansing? The cyanotype's deep blues against coloured fabrics suggest both stain and purification, contamination and clarity. These are images made through washing, fixed through rinsing—photographic development as a form of ritualised cleaning that simultaneously.
