Pattern Play
Finale Art File
30 August — 23 September 2024
Pattern Play begins with a book of patterns. More precisely, a book of patterns for 18-inch dolls’ clothes. In this two-man show by Yasmin Sison and Nicole Tee, the two interrogate the role of “play” in art, as well as within a broader experience in their own lives and beyond them.
The concept of “play” has often factored into both artists’ bodies of work as a form of resistance to the status quo. Sison focuses on perceiving joy as resistance to the ills of the world. Her work often has an undercurrent of playfulness, more visually obvious in some than in others, as is the case with her collages and miniatures, which are often rendered in vibrant colour and playful shapes and compositions. For Tee, her inclusion of craft in her pieces — or, rather, paying reverence to it as a primary aspect of her practice — is a dedicated move towards slow living. It becomes a direct rejection of the fast pace of life today, with the constant need to move and keep up with trends that change faster than one could adopt the latest one. Tee’s approach to art-making is an extension of her interior life, where she goes indoor rock-climbing, sews her own clothes, and walks among more nature-filled environments, effectively slowing down her own consumption of both the physical and digital, and offering respite from responsibilities that come with adulthood.
Based on doll part patterns in old books, Sison’s series of collages for this exhibition are all in the stage of “becoming”. Cut and printed using a variety of printing techniques, these elements are collaged together with cut-outs from other children’s books. Rather than viewing this exercise as being stunted in one’s past state as a child playing with dolls, the joy derived from the act, in spite of all else wrong in the world, is what is at play here.
Sison invited Tee to the two-man show, led by her curiosity at how the other artist would utilise these patterns, as Tee is an avid sewer and Sison is not. Another act of subversion: Tee’s diptychs, entitled, “I want to be _____” is a rejection of the phrase children often use to dream up a future career, a glimpse into a future that seems inevitably linked to being a part of the machinery of everyday capitalism. Instead, Tee selects characters, rather than occupations, that characterised childhood and girlhood. Each diptych is composed of illustrations of the clothes pattern, each one sewn by Tee using scrap fabric and off-cuts from her own sewing projects, and used as a reference for the painting of the finished garment paired with the illustration. The combination calls to mind the way these patterns are represented in these instructional diagrams.
Ultimately, both artists’ works are their own responses to a variety of issues of modern life: looking for joy in the face of chaos, rejecting participation in the machination of capitalism, insisting on living slowly and carefully, and finding fulfillment and satisfaction in these small, rebellious acts.
— Carina Santos
photos courtesy of Finale Art File