Lost in the Little Red Dot

INSTINC SOHO presents Lost in the Little Red Dot, showcasing art by INSTINC AIR Julie Andrews (Australia) including collaborative works created with local artist Valerie Ng (Singapore).

Julie’s work is a site specific response to the Instinc Singapore residency and has emerged from the strange, liminal and transient space of an artist’s residency as an attempt to map her embodied experience. In this work she is using the term liminal, which has its origin in the Latin limen, to refer to a threshold and an in-between space and a place of transition. Using a psycho-geograpical method of exploration and the adoption of a bricolage approach this work explores the everyday ‘in- between’ spaces that are suggestive of the transient liminal experience.

This work, informed by an ontological approach, places an emphasis on the phenomenological and qualitative exploration of the affective phenomenon of the liminal experience, as a whisper to the unconscious of possibilities otherwise unnoticed. She is interested in charting through my art practice the ‘feeling’ of travel, transience and liminal spaces, as a prompt for noticing subjectivity, questioning and reflection. Through the act of walking and commuting she have gathered a collection of artefacts, notes, drawings and photographs from which the work has emerged. This body of work is in itself a type of liminal journey, a psycho-geographic encounter, which I describe as a ‘drifting’ search for a path through. In this way, the work has explored her embodied knowing, or ‘felt’ experience as a valuable and provocative acceptance of our not knowing, or something in-between. This ‘not knowing’ in her work brings with it an unease and tension, just as there is in the process of mapping, and art making, with its recognition of divergent paths and the multiplicity of ideas and applications. Mapping in this context, is not about producing a traditional map in terms of the conventions of content, scale or representation; but instead it is an engagement with the site and the dynamics of the method and materials which influences the content. Her methodology is an orientation and a practical research tool because it supports a nomadic weaving and a meandering that resists containment, yet is capable of discovering cracks, gaps and voids and the often uncharted and marginal territories of the in-between liminal experience.