One inquiry, different registers

Over thirty years ago, someone gave me a gift: a place on the Slade School summer programme. I chose Greek sculpture. I had never studied art, and I did not know it would become a thread that ran through everything that followed.

Thirty years later I was in London for the final meeting of a Jungian study group that had spent four years reading Jung's Red Book together, slowly and closely. While I was there, I went back to the Slade — and took a paper folding course. From that confluence, uninvited and unplanned, this body of work nucleated: one chapter closing, another reopening, and the geometry arriving precisely at the intersection.

I have practised for seventeen years as a Jungian-oriented psychodynamic psychotherapist, the last sixteen of them in Singapore. The clinical work and the art practice are a single inquiry conducted in different registers — both concerned with how form emerges from the formless, and with the quality of attention that makes that emergence possible.

Singapore is not incidental to the work. For sixteen years I have walked past Hindu temples and Taoist shrines, mosques and churches — sometimes on the same street, sometimes sharing a wall. The mandala appears in every one of these traditions. The eight-pointed star appears in Islamic geometry, in the Hindu yantra, in the Gothic rose window. The underlying geometry is the same; the cultural clothing is different. This city's confluence of sacred imagery is a daily visual education in what is universal in symbolic form.

The works are made honestly with whatever the inquiry requires — smoke, bubble film, folded paper and resin, acrylic and metallic pigment, and in the artist books, an AI image system worked hard and iteratively, in disciplined dialogue with Jung's own text. The craft is the container. The surprise is the nucleation.

The paintings, fumage and folded works are in Singapore. Enquiries about originals, editions, exhibitions or writing are always welcome.