is unresolved,
but getting there.

Not much time to draw, but I was with the children last week. That, of all things, should be counted as working on this project.

This time many of the children were from small foster and group homes. It makes a difference when a child has two people to call Guardians, or sometimes, Parents. They rest well, they listen well, they part well.

I had two girls in my care. I was braiding the hair of one of them, and another tiny girl came and stared at us with her mouth open. She went away to get changed and then came back to stare. "You look like her mother," she said. "Only mothers will tie hair."

Last year I felt that I had a monstrous heart because my love for the kids was limited to five days. However sincere my love was, it had a cap.

This year I felt that I could stay there forever, cold showers and all. Or at least for longer than five days. Maybe because they were easier to love, maybe because I came more prepared. Maybe this monstrous heart is morphing.

change

for tiger translate.

I've also been busy reworking my final year project, drawing on trains. I find that nobody stares, I can do anything on trains.

I'm thinking along the lines of something I wrote as a subconscious doodle in the very first History of Great Inventions lecture.

"My monstrous heart
my monstrous heart
my monstrous heart
is not big enough
to take you in more than five days."

The full story coming up shortly.

a study: claustrophobia

How interesting that claustrophobia, when collided into itself, is a chaos trap.

This is your claustrophobia:
not getting too near me,

like the hikikomori perhaps,
will your earth shake if you let me in?

good lookers

I can't do a thing
so i will just have to look at you

for the ____ of typography

is made up of people who cry but hold on
and things that will start if you let them
and thorns that will turn into flowers if you let them

Nobody gets it right all the way. But love is a growing thing. So keep trying, and let it grow.

re-route

one campaign is not enough to tell all the stories i want to tell.
there is so much more.
there are the single fathers who come to be better men.
there are the children with no siblings, who come for a taste of it.
there are the abused children who grow up to help other abused children.
there are the parts of me that cannot understand or forgive.

there are only three more months.
but i think it's worth changing my route for.

posters

So we had another class exercise, and we created pieces based on another person's description of their projects. Sarinah painted a melancholy Munch-like portrait for my project. It was a child's face made out of two parents linking hands. And with these pieces created for us by our friends, we had to make posters for ourselves by adapting them in some way.

I did away with the actual painting, lovely as it was, and used Sarinah's compositing idea to redraw the balloon child:
(click picture to enlarge) The parents make up the face of the child. The cheesy slogan was a temporary filler.
These are the kind of illustrations I like to do most: smaller pictures within the big picture, hidden stories and obvious stories.

The bird is the balloon child's friend, who the balloon is afraid of getting close to at first because of its sharp beak. The balloon child is almost like the bird, just that it is tied down with a string. When it is ready to have its string cut, the bird comes back to help it with its beak.

the balloon child becomes a parent

where did you come from?
i want to protect you forever.

but i have no hands to hold you
perhaps wrapping myself around you will do

you cry too loudly for my large ears
made of air, i want to burst with air

--

Cindy suggests doing the animation first, perhaps with my voice telling the story. I know all the frames but can't bring myself to do them. I foresee them taped to my wall, my wardrobe, my shelves, a wistful narrative of disproportionate beings, and it makes me want to start.

I have to find the voice of the balloon child. Is it a soft voice? A child's voice? A girl or a boy? It seems that all these nuances of sound will determine the script. And that trickles on into the typeface, which trickles into the size and form of the book, and everything else.

I wish that 'balloon' was another word. I can't title this as Balloon Child, or Balloon.

Meanwhile, tomorrow i go back to the start. I only felt for these children when I came to know about them. And that is thanks to the royal family kids' camp, which i stumbled upon without thinking and have never untangled myself from since. Tomorrow begins the training for this year's camp, and i'll hear the stories again, sing the songs again, meet the volunteers again. Many more have signed up this year, expectant for something.

I'm not a kids person, I say to everyone. I really am not. But even among injustices there are some more unjust than others.

balloon boy and difficult things

Biomorphic explorations with the Character. With each psychological change that takes place, his body morphs a little. Until there is the swollen head, no mouth, no limbs, no heart, no belly, large ears. But there is a string tying him down.
When the Balloon becomes a parent. How can it hold its child when it has no arms? How can it handle the cries with its big ears?

The string has to be cut. And when it is cut, there is a tremendous release of pressure, and the Balloon can reform, become proportionate again, grow limbs.

I am exhausted from drawing and scanning and putting together saturday's presentation. Soon enough there will be a proper post on the Balloon.

This week I read A Child Called It by David Pelzer. And I talked to Felicia from Fostering about abuse investigation, child protection schemes, and most importantly for my project, the solutions and exits for parents who haven't been dealing too well with parenting.

From the interview, the good news is most physical abuse cases in Singapore start from the intention to find a discipline method that works; in other words, purely sadistic abuse is not common, although I will not hasten to comment on where the boundaries lie. Sexual abuse is a completely different arena altogether, slippery and altogether sinister, an inexcusable perversion.

The way I am approaching Abuse as a whole, I am closing an eye to the perversion that drives a good number of cases, and focusing instead on Abuse as a living force in itself that can be averted, like closing a window to put out the wind, or in this story, cutting the string that ties a balloon down. It is mild, it is non-confrontational. But is it right?

I still say that we shouldn't rush to condemn abusive parents as villains, because they could be victims too. But we cannot ignore the inexplicable part of it: the darkness of the soul, the demon-like glee that pushes a human being to hurt another human being, and enjoy it. This is where I must stop and think. Do we open up Pandora's Box?

fyp on the beach

It wasn't entirely play. :)

I tried some similar videos with text but the tide was going out. Maybe I'll go back another day when the tide is coming in.

Brunch insights

early sketches

I had a talk with my mother over brunch. She told me about her mother walking out on her father when he turned violent. "That taught us that we can say no to abuse," she said. Later on she moved back, and the family's story ends happily.

But what was irrevocably reaped from this episode was education. She said, "I knew what I must do if my husband ever beat me. It takes generations to learn this. In my grandmother's time women were 'oh he beat me but I cannot tell anyone, it's a shame. Only a broken rib, at least I'm alive.' Three generations down, now you won't even marry a man who perms his hair."

I swear that's my mother's exaggeration. But I get it. Silently suffering abuse is hereditary too, because children watch and learn.

By the end of lunch, I had grown a beehive of thoughts. This campaign could be educational.

seeing things #2

Julie Morstad

www.fourexhibition.blogspot.com

Carolyn Alexander

James Gulliver Hancock

Rob Ryan

Hans Op De Beeck

Sam Winston

story sketches #2

The last two days of camp are the hardest because they push us away. T gave away the present I gave her. She ran into the lift and pushed me out. "Don't follow me!" When I hugged her goodbye on the bus, she asked if i was coming along. I wasn't, and she pushed me away. I looked at her through the bus window but her eyes never met mine.

The older children are better at facing the reality of goodbyes, and let themselves cry. M always warned us about being pushed away. It's just a defense mechanism for those who are scared of separation.

Just as well, I thought, because I can't promise her forever either. I can't even give her more than five days. Still I wonder how raw her hands must be, from pulling and pushing, pushing and pushing, not even willing to make memories.

story sketches #1

It's a campaign that revolves around a story.
I want to make her somebody you love.

And so when you love her, how can you condemn her?

seeing things #1

Beauty is subjective. This is the beauty I like--a little raw, a little scraped off. All artwork not my own.

It's like a nightmare, and yet it's so sad that you want to hold it close.

I like white space, a lot of it. 

I like ambiguous fairytales told with disturbing lines. Somebody is eating somebody else, somebody is afraid, but who? 

Paper engineering is, sometimes, everything. I learnt that the hard way in year one.

What makes this image is the shape of it. And the absence of just enough.

And flatness: so gustav klimt, so egon schiele, so whitewash-over-an-underpainting. I hate gradient colouring. Let everything be pressed and pasted on walls.

This is the time for new images to be born. Every new phase has life of its own. I watch with amazement as lines and people come spilling out of the pen. It's time to stop seeing things, and let the pen bring forth what it will. 

More string explorations on the table as the sun was setting.

And pages from the book that resulted from all the exploration, shot on the light table.

Isn't daylight always prettier?

After my fruitless contemplation of an installation for fyp, i think I will do a campaign instead. Because what I want to say is best said in words, actually.

So the campaign will include:
1. a book
2. exhibition concept/ panels
3. collectibles (notebooks, stationery etc)
4. a video

I've been toying with many slogans. But today while casually telling a friend about my fyp, I said, "I'm looking at Abusers as the Abused."

And i think that is actually it.

why this project?

I didn't want to step into something so vast and sad, not for the project that supposedly launches me into the world as an illustrator/designer. I wanted to do something light and fun. Music, fashion, colour, anything but abuse.

But here it is, my fyp about the cycle of abuse.

The true reason I'm doing it is I dreamt of them again: the children. I went to the Home to visit, and T and M came and sat on the bed beside me and talked to me. I put my arms around them both and said, "You must learn to love each other." 

That's it then. I listen to my dreams. They tell me what is important to me, what lasts after music and fashion and colour. 

"You must learn to love each other" sounds so mundane. But it is a big lesson for these children, who grow up learning that they must fight and be alert to keep what is their own. 

I can't protect them from circumstances now, not by volunteering at a camp once a year. But I can help to break the cycle by teaching them that love can be safe. That they don't have to grow into their adult bodies with the same tense hearts of hardened children. 

What I can't wrap my mind around is the lens of this project. There's a campaign, a company identity, print media, new media, and installation. I flung myself at Installation because it was the only one that seemed airy and large enough to contain everything I want to say. But maybe not. 

String: an exercise

Explorations with that roll of white string. I don’t like cute chubby stiff string, I like thin scrawls of membrane that look alive and floating. Shot on a light table in the workshop.

How will this relate to my fyp? String is such a basic metaphor that almost any story can be told about knots (the default troublemakers in any situation). It’s not easy to be original with a ball of string. I may or may not use the knot metaphor because of that.

But if I did, this is my string story: if you don’t unravel the knots as they form, they’ll remain unpicked as other knots form. Again, could be said about any other issue in the world.

I much prefer to look at the nervous quality of the string, how alive and how floating it looks cuddled up as a nest, and how similar it is to my own scrawled handwriting.

Helping with Jane Lee and Paolo for the biennale, which should teach me a thing or twenty about installations and the working process. It’s worth skipping class for, and my meetings with them will be up on this blog too.