Taipei Biennale: Post-Nature—A Museum as an Ecosystem

Lucy Davis (Migrant Ecologies Project)
Fragments from the Together Again (Wood:Cut) series
A material-led research into stories of wood in Southeast Asia. 2008-ongoing

The assemblage of works displayed here comprise small fragments, produced at different stages during what is now a ten year material-led process of research into stories of wood in Southeast Asia. The project’s different iterations have collectively attempted to work through the material of wood-print and cut-wood in order to recast the form, spirit and micro-gestures of the mid twentieth century Malayan modern woodcut movement by artists of the migrant Chinese left in a context of continuing, macro scale “cuttings of wood” i.e. regional deforestation.

Instead of searching for “the spirit of a tree in the wood”, or in the various wooden objects she had collected on the streets of Singapore, each of Davis’ woodprint-collage and animated film works aim for the reverse: The collages are made of small variegated fragments of prints of the objects, pasted laboriously together again, in an endeavor to indexically-invoke:
The spirit of an object in the dream of the original tree (tree collages)
The spirit of an object in the reproduction of timber patriarchies via family photographs (wood-people collages).
The spirit of an object as it metamorphosizes through wood-thickened ecologies, where dreams in DNA code meet forest spririts and where fingerprints meet woodgrain, across the archipelago.