Conflict & Resolutions
Theres a multitude of reasons for me to be sitting here and writing this right now. Number one is because there is this urgency that urges me to document. A rattlesnake that rattles me. I’ve decided the exact three point turn I’m going to sink my nails through. Speed through, SCREAM THROUGH and it’s documenting in this way - hey, it’s your lucky day. Came across a post on the internet saying sobriety brings people to the same three interests they had when they were 14. For me, that was many things but to narrow some down - writing, picnics at the nearby playground, running, taking photographs and drawing pictures. Now everyone has the important dates in their life that they hold on to for sentimental reasons, for me that is officially today. Today, I am approaching this with a refurbished attitude. It is now in my best interest that this online void consistently hosts more if not most of whatever I’d like to share. Just us two, me and she and he and you who views. Hello.
Archives of food pics and paragraphs in my phone taking up storage and reminding me 'One Year Ago Today'...or 'Remember When...' and the fact of the matter is that I do remember it all. This year has been the squeaky cleanest. I am awake and aware. So much so that I've been planning for the future with a hope reminiscent of a familiar naïveté I've missed.
I'm on my back right now, in bed. Hips barely hanging off of the edge because I already have my shoes on and I'm rehearsing for these heels to be on jagged tar roads and chipped tiled staircases right here in my bedroom first. Fully dressed for a day out. About to go to the shared studio I have with M. But first, waiting for the washing machine to beep signaling the laundry is clean and governmentally approved. There's Indoor Drying Technology ingredients infused in the detergent I use. At my big age, I still get lost in grocery and appliances isles but rarely miss good packaging and even more seldomly fall for it. Anyways reading the ingredients list is my favourite past time from pet foods to Persil. M talks to me about wanting 11 children and to live through self established permaculture. I know he's joking (the 11 children part) but has got me thinking about the importance of self reliance in day to day necessities. One day I'll map it all out from my repurposed tree villa, my own water, electrical and nourishment resources but right now, the washing machine is beeping.
13 November 2024 - Wednesday
Currently in the studio, it's moving furniture day. Before Mati, this space used to house a bookmaker and publisher, so the layouts, equipments and furnishings served this purpose. Now, it's time to reorganise and revisit the Feng Shui of this space to serve ours. Contrary to the advise of acupuncturists and chiropractors I've visited (which I have only tried for the first time in my life this year. Hello mid-twenties!) the floor remains my favourite area to work. A studio that accommodates my preferences would require a carpet I can get paint on and have #NoRagrets and floor and floor and floor.
The floor can be like sky to me; vast, unending, holding different colours and shapes of clouds depending on the time of day. Before this, I was less fussy and would say yes, sure, bare naked concrete and over 12 hours of labour - What could possibly go wrong? But my tailbone disagrees. My physicality disagrees and my doctor visits get more expensive. So a rug it is. Snug and warm. Stained and spread out. To host my physicality, day in day out until I can say, Hey, it's my debut solo exhibition today.
2024 saw me preparing for my solo. Obsessively. In planes, on trains, first thought, first thing in the morning. With the solo show I am from here on out referencing to as SS. Starting from a first group show in November 2021 followed by another in March 2022 and then on and on and on to this day, I haven’t felt as confident as I do now to say, yes, Okay, 2025, I want it too much now to deny myself this privilege of a possibility. It just has to happen not late, not early but precisely when it is supposed to. The road to the SS is obvious: Make works, show works, easy. But as works of art no matter music, visual, written, the etcetera goes, most of what many will see is the polished finished Thing. Rarely the problems, the process, the tension and passion. Except maybe through their own definitions, standing in front of the magnum opus. "Yes, you see that red stroke there, I feel the chaos and the anger", to a reply of "Oh, really? I find the red quite romantic and soft" and their debate remains for that duration up until the arrival of another person from a separate friend group asking them how their weekend was and that they must, absolutely must have brunch tomorrow and never do until five months later. Yes, I hear you, this projection is a disease yet experience is the best teacher. Which brings me here.
Leading up to the SS, I find time to be on the internet and watch live music shows, YouTube and cat reels and that's time I'll never get back. This is the long form internet interlude to document the process. Train of thinking, trail of doing. I am speaking it out into the world that I will make writing a daily habit.
Everyday is a renewed opportunity for a new dilemma. The one I’ve been going through recently as a normal functioning human being of 20 something years of age in 2024 with a postcode, passport, bank and social media accounts was just that. Today all I wanted to discuss was my crippling caution of taking up space. You mean - I am a living, breathing being that is seen and weighed by others? That I hold permission, excuses, past, intellect, humor, emotion and I do things that have cause and effects? I am careful not to scare myself. This unoriginal worry has such a chokehold on us civilized participants of the human race. Free will but read the room, please. (And that's on growing tf up and participating in (im)polite society)
Thank god for art. Here, I don't have to behave and get commended for it. I've been weighing on and orchestrating series after series of works for the SS. Including collaborations with musicians that I'm working towards or the series involving my family members and it's taking so much more time than I expected it to. Being so used to working alone or through collaborative efforts in Mati, when I work with outside parties I find myself sheltered and worried. It is a different choreography all together to ask someone if the line is better on the left or right, whether it should be circle or square. I find collaboration to be an exercise in consideration and change, not compromise but change. An antonymous attitude is exercised between compromise and change. To compromise requires selflessness in arriving to an agreement and to change, well, you try it and tell me. Dwelling on it, both these traits look like twins with differing hearts and minds but human still, humane still. The root remains a feeling and deadlines stay unforgiving.
15 November 2024 - Friday
“One person prays for cloudy shade and another prays for a bright sun. The sky brings heavy rain for the sleeping someone, who hasn’t said a word all day” - I wrote in my mind and had it stashed there, since last week while overlooking a fussy piece of cyanotype and heavy traffic. Poetry is seeped in my skin and permanent perspective. I have words for things I have yet to understand and it is for the pleasure and productivity of no one but me. My selfish, lonely alone is how I came, alone is how I’ll go memories start and end with it. Though I’m optimistic these days, just an absolute sweetheart, I am, sure. Thinking through occurrences like the labour pains my mother had to endure to bring me here - I am not alone. A watchful eye in the form of a consistent star in the sky that sits perfectly in front of me from where I sit each night on the bench of my balcony - I am not alone. The fat, soul-reaching hugs and jawline aerobics laughter of my friends - I am not alone. And of course, the two lazy kittens sleeping by my feet as I write this, their presence and vibrations of their purring balancing my chemistry, their litter box I empty and their food bowl I fill. Yup, I am most definitely not bloody alone.
I have independently lived in this city for five years now and affectionately grew up with household cats ever since I can remember. This combination proves my self control, else this house would’ve already turned into an animal shelter within that first year. In my hometown, there is no shortage but in fact an on growing influx of cats in our home. We have the main cast: Lady, Sydney, Charlie, Rocket, and also the guest stars: Yoko, Lucy, Simon, Bobby. The guest stars come for a good meal and a good time. In recent years, my family has been open to learning more on the supplementary veterinary needs of the cats which has significantly improved their lifestyle and somehow brings more and more cats to the doorstep. They’re even planning to spay and neuter all the guest star cats who come to our house. Without them even being informed of it, they are involved in a TNR program of their own creation. In the city, I’ve only been able to express this affection through stray animals these past few years and now, I get a full body inspection when I come home from a day out that includes cautious sniffing and dilated pupils of these two cats at the smell of betrayal or intrusion.
Their names are Bon (Bonnie, Bonnifer, Con, Connie, Con-artist) and Rudyclyde (Rudy, Goody Two Shoes, Woody, Clyde)
16 November 2024 - Saturday
What I love most about animals and plants are that they do not care about my occupation. It isn’t their nature to know it or want anything to do with it which isn’t necessarily the case with human beings. I read on Twitter: “…The bees are not stockpiling honey to sell at a profit. The trees are not charging the bees to build their hive. The soil is not leasing itself to the flowers. The sun is not sending bills to them all”. Bon, Rudy and the balcony plants only honour my treatment of them and care for my care.
Through Islamic prayer, we are taught the practice of ‘Khusyuk’ or mindful focus. A state of humility that takes you deep into your devotion where your mind, body and soul unite as one while in worship. My monkey mind finds this hard because I am guilty of passively consuming instead of actively seeking so to think of nothing, even that is something. Patterned prayer mats don’t make it any easier for me because ape see pattern, ape goes on train of thought, when ape goes on train of thought, ape loses focus and forgets which verse ape is on. Recently, I’ve formed a way of thinking of extremely larger than life places in nature. For example, guesstimating how many of myself stacked onto myself would it take to equate the rocky trails of Everest or how dwarfed my average height would be, floating against the backdrop of the South China Sea. How small my being, my feelings, my heart, my worries, compared to the faith residing in how this life came to be. How large the world, how silly the girl.
I rehearse this in prayer or when I’m feeling BIGFEELINGS. That no matter how serious it seems to me in the moment, that it’ll pass and I will live as long as I pursue improvement. If khusyuk can be practiced in my faith, then I must also strive to practice it in the details of my day to day, my love, my art. The act of creating proves to be a devotion in itself. To bring to life something that wasn’t before. To allow subconscious flow of ideas I have yet to understand using me as its vessel. It takes loyalty to the concept, an allegiance to assist its becoming and commitment to the best interest of something larger than myself.
11.01PM
A confirmed trip back to my hometown for the next month. I’ll miss my cats here but look forward to the cats there. Two black bags sit nicely packed behind my wooden, grey room door. I’ve packed retinol, old clothes and new fears. Having something to lose is the privilege of recognising love, not granted to everyone. I am always hungry now and the restaurants remain open until late. Might stop by one and then the studio to pick up all the materials I’m going to need to work in the next month. In Johor, I have a room to myself where I sleep, paint and host people. There’s a special place in my life for the friends I have in that town for their understanding that a day out with me often ends with a meal in my family home, feeding my cats and accompanying me in the studio til late while I work on something or just draw a picture for them to keep. I’ll have more to tell you when I actually live it. Love it.
Until then.
BT
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