Residue: Tracing the Lore (2015). Collaboration with Brendan Tang
Residue: Tracing the Lore is a collaboration between ceramic-based artist Brendan Tang and print-based artist Diyan Achjadi. Both Brendan Tang and Diyan Achjadi work with the language of the decorative, and its social, cultural and political histories. Much of their work also reflects on and responds to popular cultural forms, such as illustration and comic books. In their respective individual practices, both are engaged with the histories of their disciplines – ceramics for Brendan Tang and printmaking for Diyan Achjadi – and negotiate questions around craft, skill, tradition, value, and authorship in their sculptures, prints and drawings.
This collaboration began as a Research Residency at Malaspina Printmakers, undertaken to explore the potential of 3D printing in contemporary printmaking practice. In this project, the artists worked together to find points of alignment from their individual practices in order to arrive at a body of work that reflected both their research, while allowing the new project to form its own separate characteristics. Achjadi and Tang, both from diasporic backgrounds, explore the ways that ornamentation may reveal histories of the migration of images and ideas, and the ways that these motifs then seep into one’s own personal narrative. Through imprinting these fragments of images onto the skin of close relatives, this project asks how familial lores and traditions are transmitted, and the residue that they leave upon us. The resulting images suggest cultural forms such as tattooing and body-modification, while in fact they are ephemeral and fugitive impressions.
Dr. Glen Lowry wrote the exhibition essay for this series.
