Gayle Chong Kwan

'The Circulating Department', 2021, was developed as part of my PhD in Fine Art on 'Imaginal Travel: political and ecological positioning through fine art practice'. The photographs, sculptures, and worn works were created as Artist in Residence in Photography at the V&A Museum to questions stasis, permanence, and museology through specific histories of the V&A and its collection through movement, entropy, and collaborative activities with people who work at the museum.

I became fascinated by the V&A’s historical Circulation Department, which lasted between 1850 and 1977, after which objects in its collection were dispersed throughout the wider collection. Its archives are kept at Blythe House, where objects not on display at any of the V&A museums are stored. Unlike the rest of the V&A which had a ’50-year rule’, whereby only work that was over 50 years old could be collected, the Circulation Department collected contemporary work. The Circulation Department was the first ‘travelling gallery’ in the UK. It loaned original works and copies to provincial and national museums, libraries, galleries, art colleges, and schools. The department had a higher than usual intake of women, many of its staff were educated at art college rather than Oxbridge, and some were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The photographic works that I developed connect with each other in different ways. Each is developed within a larger series of images, and each are distinct ‘works’ that are temporal moments made visible within a research process. A series of photographic works document the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of the museum when they are not on display to the public. In these photographic moments, the fragility, tenderness, and impermanence of the objects are more apparent than when they are on display in the museum, through the packaging, support structures, or the other objects that are involved in dehumidifying, cleaning, and protecting them and the rooms in which they are kept.

I made six headpieces created using the photographs I had taken, images of objects in the collection suggested by people who I spoke with who work at the V&A, and millinery techniques to make shapes based on the foam inserts that are used to transport objects. I used sinamáy to cover the foam shapes then dried it so that the forms became the structural base of each headpiece. Onto this I sewed cut out parts of the photographs. The six headpieces developed around the following themes related to movement in the museum: circulation; bridging; infestation; performing; decompose/de-acquisition; and appearance. They were photographed in the Raphael Cartoons in the V&A. In the context of the museum the stands became part of the complex relationship between photography, object, and colonial violence. I took photographs of each person wearing the headpiece, photographed in a location of importance to them at the V&A.

Wastescape (2019) was an installation in Silo 6 in Auckland Harbour for Auckland Arts Festival, which took place between 7-24 March in 2019, which was developed art part of my PhD research in Fine Art on 'Imaginal Travel: political and ecological positioning as fine art practice'.

The installation developed through research I did on the effects of the dairy industry on the rivers of New Zealand. I carried out research at the Auckland War Memorial Museum (AM) where I began to focus on the Pacific Collection Access Project (PCAP). This research informed my thinking and making and had a profound emotional and conceptual effect on my sense of the relationships between objects, personhood, and ancestral and collective meaning. This research began to infuse the work that I developed around the ecological effects of the dairy industry on the country’s rivers, from effluent run off, the use of chemicals for managing pastures, and land use for cattle rearing. I wanted to make visible the accumulation of plastic waste from the dairy industry as a small slither in a particular time and place. I worked with Te Tuhi to set up the collection of used plastic milk bottles from local schools and community groups over the period of four months. Te Tuhi set up regular collection of the used bottles from those who were involved and a room in which to store them. Te Tuhi collected around six thousand used bottles. I designed wooden structures and posts onto which I attached the bottles by threading strong and using staples, to form structures that were around one and half metres high and around a metre wide. I installed the structures on the floors and to the grain hoppers on the ceilings in each of the six rooms in Silo 6. The milk bottles became elements that created a textural environment that resembled stalagmites and stalactites.

I created a series of 12 headpieces made out of photographic images, that I had taken and also copyright free images that I had found of the rivers. Each headpiece was based on one of New Zealand’s rivers that are affected by dairy pollution: Waikato; Matau; Whanganui; Taieri; Rangitikei; Mataura; Waiau; Clarence; Waitaki; Oreti; Rangitaiki; and Manawatu. I explored different techniques of cutting and weaving in shapes and forms that were determined by the strength and form of the photographic paper and the cuts and shapes that followed the river’s outlines. I was interested in weaving an inter-connected flow between river, person, land, life, past, present, and future through photographic collage. I installed the headpieces at head height on wooden posts at intervals along the corridor through the centre of the six silo spaces.

Plot Four, Chemin de Moulin Casse, Perybere, in Mauritius, is a roughly 30m square morcellement. It is sited in the midst of small-scale properties in an area that was once a wetland, that still periodically floods.It has not been built upon. There are mounds of domestic rubbish and leftover building materials. The paint, plastic, paper, concrete, and bricks are like discarded material props of the backstage of an incrementally and increasingly theatricalized version of a paradise island. I began to film the plot at different times of the day and night.

In a break from filming, I visited Curepipe Botanical Garden, which was established in 1870 by the British colonial administration to be able to cultivate plants in the cooler and wetter part of the island. The main Botanical Garden in Mauritius had been established in Pamplemousses by the French colonial administration in 1770, which was renamed as the Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanical Garden. In the midst of Curepipe Botantical Garden stands a single palm tree framed by a metal scaffold.The tree is the last of the hyophorbe amaricaulis palm species. It has colloquially been named ‘The Loneliest Palm’. It was not brought into the botanical garden but was already growing on the land on which the garden was sited, where it was subsequently recognised as being the sole survivor of its species.