Outcome – Musings

Hair Dictionary | reflections

(Some context: this was the work I did for Astrid’s VC4 class where we are to create a dictionary for our potential FYP topics)

Trichotillomania is a pretty small topic but hair, woah, hair is a huge huge topic.

Love it, hate it or fear it, hair has been so prevalent in human cultures over at our span of time on earth that it is intertwined in so much of the human condition. So much complexities and ironies lie amongst a pile of dead cells growing from your scalp. It is never “oh, it is just hair”.

I separated my dictionary into two parts. The first a preface of sorts. Why do I want to do this project, why hair? It was more on a cathartic self- expression and exploration piece and while doing it, I realised how much hair had played in my struggle for approval, an identity, and self love growing up. I imagined that this preface as a documentation of me treating myself as a word, what defines me, what are my origins, what do other people define me etc.

I’ve chosen this part to be illustrated as I wanted it to be 100% me and with illustration something that I am most comfortable with, it just felt natural expressing myself through this medium.

The second part of the dictionary is a tad more straightforward, I’ve collected main words and from those main words and its definitions, I categorised events, knowledge, cultures , etc etc into those parts. At the end of the book there are a list of artists that inspire me and how they treated the medium of hair or deal with issues of anxiety, identity and trauma.

As much as the first part is 100% me, this component is 100% not me, in the sense that it contains themes, ideas and culture that are not mine. While the book is clean for now, I’ve included lots of white spaces to eventually turn this book into something JJ Abrams did for his book titled S.

The additional notations, highlighting scrapbooking done in a single book all by different personas and minds is just beautiful to me. It reminds me of the past where we could write and notate on books we own. I find the process slowing allowing more of my personality and thoughts into the book, slowly digesting these information into something that could amplify my own.

I am super excited to do so to my dictionary once I get more and more information about my topic during my FYP process.

For the fun of it, to probably just start off FYP where this project ends, I’ve also included a hair-o-graphics which documents (roughly) the hairstyles that I’ve had over the years and why they are done so. It compliments the first part of the dictionary and I guess it helps in explaining Trich to most people.

Overall, this dictionary experience is as cathartic as it is rough to make, over 80 pages in and I still feel that there are still a lot that I have not discovered and read about yet. Even so, it made me understand why people treat hair with almost god like importance or why they choose to remove it completely. Our human obsession with those dead cells is never only just hair but rather it as a common medium to express the multiple facets and complexities of our emotions.

In the end, it is only just hair right?

Project 1 Time | Final work & Reflections

(N.B I haven’t been tagging these posts right last time hence I’m reuploading them in hopes that they appear in the class pages again! ( please visit my page for a accurate timeline of posts though! )

Now that this project is over, it’s time to reflect. I’ve started his project with a very large and pretty unorganised train of thought. With some self reflection, I’ve decided to define time as a huge muddy sea of constants and variables.

Constants: The locations I visit, the timing of which I take the pictures, the subjects of the photo, the life I live, the society around me, the skies I get to see.

– Routines, structure, the inexplicable movement of time as the sun undoubtedly rises and sets.

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Variables: When the wind blows clouds over to cover parts of the sun, when a lady refuse to budge from her spot in my shot. How I see the world in a stressful morning, how I respond to it during a relaxed evening.

– Emotions of mine, emotions of others. The movement of nature, the inevitable bits of chaos.

How do we measure time in Singapore? This question still lingers in my mind.

I believe that in a society so obsessed with constants, are variables the only things left that at least give some idea that time has passed?

If we cannot control constants, we should try to be variables, or at least try to take note of the variables around us.

The Sun will always rise and set, but where its light touches, where a shadow is cast onto the ground. No two photos are the same, no two seconds are the same. Everything is always changing every day, every hour, every second.

The book is hence titled “In the light of” from the idiom,

In the light of something:

considering, because of, taking into account, bearing in mind, in view of, taking into consideration, with knowledge of

The title is a play on the fact that, yeah the photos are of shadows and things that have been under the light of the sun. But also taking into account the life around us, how time passes, how constants drive us, how variations change us and how we feel about those things.

Anyhoo, I’ve included the photo book for you guys to read!

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A friend told me that my photos reminded her of Edward Hopper‘s works. If you are unfamiliar with his works, Edward Hopper is a American painter who captures scenes and architecture iconic of America’s golden years of the 1920’s to 50’s. The catch is that his works are without a lot of the glitz and glamour that usually comes pre-packaged with these imagery, but it’s not overtly morose either.

Hopper’s scenes usually depict those of people being indoors. White spaces occupy most of the canvas, nearly empty rooms, characters in the painting ignoring one another, geometric landscapes with blocks of sunlight invading the scene… these are common elements in his works.

A sense of isolation, loneliness, melancholy and serenity could be seen in his works.

( One of my favourite works of his is Rooms by the Sea, 1951)

While the reference is unintentional, Hopper had been influential in some way because of how much of his works resonates with me. I’ve always somehow wanted to be in those rooms and scenes he paints because of how quiet, spacious and isolated it all is. I was pleasantly surprised to find a quote from him that accurately explains some parts of my project.

There will be, I think, an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods, together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions.

Pathetic fallacy, chaos theory; check and checked.

Edward Hopper is renowned for his reluctance to discuss himself and his art, Hopper simply summed up his art by stating, “The whole answer is there on the canvas.”

As much as I have lots and lots of themes and ideologies into my work, I think in the most basic reason we do what we do is ultimately for our love for sunlight and how it made a crummy rigid world slightly more beautiful.

As Hopper puts it,

Maybe I am not very human – what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

If he’s not very human, I’m not quite sure if I am too.

(Originally posted on 12/3/2016)

Time Keeping Devices – Water capillary action

Group: Allan, Marilyn, Rachel, Elizabeth

Time Keeping Devices: Water Capillary action and Time Candle.

Our first experiment was largely inspired by the Chromatography experiment that we would all do during our secondary school days. Ink chromatography relies on water capillary action in order to separate various elements in a compound for identification. Your mysterious compound sample (in our case, food dye) is placed near the bottom of a vertical strip of paper and placed onto a small puddle of water barely covering the base of the paper. The cool thing is that water through capillary action would go against gravity and travel up the vertical piece of paper, bringing the dye pigments up together with it.

Photo credits: Birdandlittlebird

Capillary action happens due to the cohesive and adhesive nature of water molecules. Water is able to travel upwards when the adhesion of the water molecules to the walls of a vessel ( the paper fibres) is stronger than the cohesive forces between themselves. But of course, there is a limit to this when the water is too high up to be able to counter against the forces of gravity.

The question now is, will the rate of water traveling up the paper be that consistent enough to be an accurate time keeping device. True enough, during our research we came upon an wonderful art piece by Oscar Diaz which uses the same scientific principles to create a calendar. Hence we were largely convinced that the time keeping device should be accurate at keeping time to a certain degree.

In our experimentation, we used various types of paper and see how well the medium could facilitate the movement of water. In the time-lapse video below, we’ve used a 25 cm strip of magic-clean paper towel with a concoction of food dye and water.

It took roughly 10 mins for the dye to travel from one end to another, well… only for that one strip. The others that we’ve tried took longer or shorter than 10 minutes largely due to the fact that the dye would not travel all the way to the end of the strip despite the fact that the strip itself is completely soaked with clear water.

We tried another experiment using a longer strip of paper cut into a zig-zag pattern and have the dye poured onto the strip instead.

While you can see the capillary action going on with that experiment, the rate of which the water was travelling was way too fast as compared to the previous experiment. Where did we go wrong? We are not too sure.

We compelled a list as to which elements could be a factor to the different rates of which the dyed water could travel up the strips. Maybe it could be the height of the container holding the dye water, or the dye-to-water ratio. Perhaps the length of the strips of paper or the amount of fibres in one strip, or -gasp- a mysterious scientific phenomenon not yet discovered by man?

Well, we don’t really know and we were pretty pressed for time, hence we have to find another time-keeping device. While our experiments sort of failed, this does not take away the fact that the gradual colour-changing effect of the strip is pretty neat though.