BOUND

2022

48” x 96”

Oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, cheesecloth, rope, copper wire, ash on canvas

Bound was the second of my large-scale works and is perhaps one of the most overt experiments in the questioning of how myth shapes (and often distorts or contorts) our perceptions of the world. Over time, I have moved further back to the realization of how we inevitably create narratives with which we use to understand and in essence, frame the world around us; a kind of way to create structure and order with our experiences. Myths then are a vessel through which communities and culture create these unifying senses of order which are carried down through generations and come to define a culture. Of course here again the danger comes from not questioning or pushing at these which is when these myths (which often contain traces of their own ideologies) concretize and feeds into itself—hence ouroboros becoming an image that returns to me in more recent works. 

Here again, there is the juxtaposition of perspectives and also wordplay with the title both as being river-bound but also bound in the sense of constriction. The central figure, one of the rare figurations in my work and already sinking away into abstraction, is a continuation of my ‘drowning boy’ from Preserved who was the first dead person I saw growing up. We were the same age and while traveling around Thailand, my family and I had come across this temple in the north that happened to be having his funeral rites—he had just drowned a few days prior. His family kindly invited us in and I was able to walk up to see him in the coffin. It was a strangely calm experience (unlike all the ghost stories I had heard growing up) albeit a haunting one. Over time, I’d begun to see him as an emblem (here I go creating my own narrative around that experience) of children being bound and constricted not only by one’s cultural climate but also by the education system and methodologies that can often carry very deep-seated ideologies one has to break out from later in life.