Carolyn Oei

Carolyn Oei (Singapore) works only with used fabrics for her hand-crochet practice, which considers larger ideas of landscape. Human and emotional landscapes are drawn from relationships that are expressed through the materiality and memory of clothing and processed through the manual labour of making, which troubles the notions of time and value. Her writing and research focus on participatory culture as it manifests in social justice work, education, community art and participatory art. She is the co-founder of Mackerel, an independent art journal dedicated to culture, literature and social commentary. Carolyn is a writer, educator, arts manager and hand-crochet artist, and holds a Master of Education (English) from Nanyang Technological University.

Hybrid: I am a noun and an adjective.

Hybridity: I am a state of mixedness and intermingling. Present Continuous and almost never-ending.

TEU is Carolyn Oei’s first iteration of a quest to understand her heritage through her memories of her late paternal grandmother. Mama was born in Cianjur, West Java. Her migration into her husband’s life – one that had no birth family – was a migration into a void. Forced migration took Mama around West Java and eventually to Singapore in 1946, shortly after the pronouncement of Pancasila in an Indonesia that was changing.

“So many things mean something to me – Mama’s sayur asem, a beautiful sarong kebaya, yoga, Hokkien gua, Eurovision, the complex simplicity of Eastern languages, prata at midnight…”