(Born 1959, Ingham; lives and works in Singapore since 2008)

“The work - ‘[What if I want to water ski?] And Other Questions’ – represents a segment of a more extensive project, ‘Re-Dressing the Veil’, undertaken in Australia (Cairns & Mareeba), Malaysia (Penang) and Singapore in 2007-2008. Voicing questions is one of the provocations and outcomes of the project that encompasses photographs, interviews, video and workshops, and which, broadly speaking, examines perceptions of Islam through the text and fabric of the ‘hijab’ . Despite having lived and worked in the Southeast region now for more than a decade, it is the need for self-reflexivity in relation to my own nagging judgements about women and ‘hijab’ - in response to both local conditions and a growing global and ‘politicized’ attention to Islam – that form the initial impetus for the project. Further to this, is a serendipitous thread connecting earlier work I undertook in Indonesia and Malaysia during 2003-2006, in which Muslim women were initiating dialogue around ‘jilbab’ and ‘tudung’, respectively.
A certain hypothesis informs the project, which is—popular media’s depiction of Islam as polarised by two highly charged images—the ‘active terrorist’ and the ‘passive veiled woman’. My interest is with the latter. Dealing with such a topical subject feels problematic anyway, but particularly so as a non-Muslim. However, my beginning point is one of the possibility of art providing an active space for degrees of exploration and realisation of oneself in relation to socio-cultural codes, conditions, enactments and systems of belief—ideological, religious, cultural—and of how these participate in shaping our perceptions and misperceptions of ‘others’.
The photographic portraits shown here, of Muslim women in Penang (Malaysia), function as a documentation of a cross-section of styles of adornment of ‘hijab’, but also, I hope, to locate the ‘veiled woman’ as ‘portraitable’, not reduced to journalistic depictions only. Photographing each of the women comes at the end of a conversation in her home or other location of her choice. We talk about ‘hijab’. I choose never to directly ask ‘Why?’ because firstly, choices and reasons will inevitably underlie and inform conversation, and secondly, because the ‘hijab or not’ discourse is not my focus. These portraits though, as with the popular depictions they seek to counter, operate silently, being spoken for and about.
The lens of ‘race’ is almost unavoidable in Malaysia, constantly reminding me of my own ‘otherness’, although Penang, as one of the sites for the project, is not really typical of the cultural/religious/race demographics of Malaysia, in so far as the island has both a large population of Chinese origin Malaysians and a noticeable presence of Muslims of Indian origin. This is one of the reasons I chose to work in Penang, rather than Kuala Lumpur. Having said this, my own approach to this body of work is to move fluidly back and forth through the matrix of local to global without trying to establish clear parameters.
Voicing questions, as mentioned earlier, appear to lie at the heart of the work. How do questions, though, translate into artwork? One of the hazards of art practice that is situated within a broader context of socio-cultural activity, is how to shape it for public presentation, especially when as the author/artist/instigator, I feel the real work lies in processes and outcomes that lie outside of the gallery. What I can say of these processes, which may not be evident here, is that they encourage a certain degree of courage: the courage to ask seemingly dumb questions, of a multifariously textured subject, in a climate that favours muffling of questions from various positions for fear of offending others. We are naturally curious beings. The questions of the book/video are in fact, genuine questions voiced and written by some of those curious women.” (Artist Statement)

ACTIVITY