Hello all :)
The past week had been full of movement and also lots of excitement for us, as we prepared to leave our studio in Singapore to spend a month in Kuang, a small industrial town about an hour’s drive out of Kuala Lumpur for an artist residency programme.
In the midst of all the roadside cafes, Warungs, hardware stores, there is a plot of land with very tall trees…
While we are still settling in and battling at least 3 different species of mosquitoes, we thought it would be nice to share more about the space and what has caught our eyes so far…
If you would like to learn more about the origins and people behind Rimbun Dahan and their residency programmes, you can check out their site here! Right now, other than us, there are also two Malaysian artists and a Cambodian filmmaker/artist, who have been working on-site for a month before we arrived.
With over 2,300 trees, the land is managed as an “Indigenous Garden”, with many native trees of Peninsular Malaysia planted since the 1990s. What is especially fascinating are the many Dipterocarp trees, a plant family consisting of almost 700 species, who share the characteristic of tall, straight-boled trunks with 2-5-winged fruits. The most distinctive ones that many of us would be familiar with are the 2-winged fruits that look like badminton shuttlecocks!
They are quite rare in Singapore, but we can find many of their seeds when hiking in Malaysian forests. We heard from a friend that there is a lady in Kulai, Johor, that makes seed art with them.
In the first month of our time here, we are planning to experiment and learn more about different kinds of plant-based material for art practice. Other than colour pigments, we are also curious about plant-based adhesives and binders, which are typical material needed for artmaking. We think a study of such material would be useful in our goal of making our artistic process as self-sustainable as practically possible.
We try to walk the garden every morning, though we do have to cover up quite a bit here and lather on some repellent. Walking the grounds is a simple yet the most important practice, or even ‘ritual’, wherever we go. It is the most basic way of learning about a site before trying to work with it. It is also the entry into seeing unique colours, textures, material, elements that eventually give us ideas for what to make on-site.
On one of our garden walkabouts, we noticed a pruned branch with red resin stains flowing from the bark. Based on the pruning record, the species is Dialium walichii from the bean family.
We harvested some of the resin and will be sharing more about it next time.
The thing about living in a space with giant trees is that well, sometimes they fall especially in seasons when the winds are strong. This one fell quite recently, exposing the crumbly light yellow clay underneath, which why not, we are currently processing a bit of into pigments ;)
Right outside our studio is a Syzigium polyanthum, locally-known as the Salam tree. Encik Jasmi, one of the staff at Rimbun, shared that the fragrant leaves are used to cook curries, and in the local markets they sell a bag of the leaves for a few Ringgit. The tree bears fruits aplenty, as you can tell from the picture below of the fallen ones. The birds seem to be attracted to this tree because of that too.
We were also drawn to the beautiful tree rings of a Meranti (Shorea sp.) tree that also fell over. It looks like there is still energy for her to grow into a new tree! We are not sure about the very dark ring. Perhaps they are very dense tree rings, or there is a change of colour due to oxidation? If anyone knows better, we would love to learn more.
In the next letter, we hope to share more about the material found and harvested for our experiments. It is always inspiring to visit new spaces, so we hope to share more of this process with you guys.
Thank you for checking in and reading this newsletter! If you enjoy it, please spread the love and curiosity.
Till next time,
Liz and Shirin