Blog
I grew up on the west side of Singapore surrounded by parks, hills, and a defunct granite quarry modelled after the famous Guilin mountains in China, hence aptly named Little Guilin.
So nature was always right outside my window.
Living in the east now, I miss the dense foliage and earthy smells from time to time. It’s very possible to hide in the shade of nature everywhere you walked, and when it rained, the sounds of the rain pouring down and the trees dancing to the rhythm was nature’s very own orchestra.
As an older kid now, I’m still drawn to nature. There’re a lot more varieties of plants gracing the streets of Singapore now, so everywhere you turn, there’s always something interesting to see and smell.
I used to learn all the names of the weeds and wild flowers growing along the streets, like Mimosas, Ixoras, Angsanas, etc. but now I’ve resigned to the fact that I’ll never be able to remember all the names of new plants I come across anymore, there’s just too many~
A funny thing about memory, we can picture what we remember in our minds and try to replicate it. But unless you have a photographic memory, chances are something just doesn’t look quite right.
Wild is a series of plants I’m drawing from memory. They look familiar but not quite. Like you know it, but can’t quite put your finger on it. I love that~
In dotdotdot, I talked briefly about how I came about creating with toothpicks and how dotting has become a form of meditation in this anxious era.
It was much easier being a kid in the 90s when entertainment meant prerecorded VHS tapes, cassettes, and on the odd occasion minesweeper on the PC, though those were typically limited activities for when the folks said yes. Most days were either spent hanging out with neighbours at the playground, sharing snacks in the void deck, or sprawled on the sofa reading a book.
These days, I’m too old to play with the neighbourhood kids and VHS and cassettes are considered archeological artefacts~ so like (99%) of the rest of the world, I find myself glued to my mobile phone wiling the time away like an addict. You’d think with only 1 thing to place your attention on, it’s a lot better than the times when there were a gazillion other things we could do. But this tiny little gadget has managed to store virtually everything you can imagine, from videos, games, music, to looking into the daily lives of complete strangers.
And I didn’t really notice this till Felix pointed out that I’ve become increasingly scatterbrained and have a significantly shortened attention span. This led to a long discussion of phone addiction and its side effects on focus and anxiety. This hit hard… Addiction, to anything, feels like shame, a weakness, and it's a bitter pill to swallow.
The rare occasions where I’m not glued to any device is when I’m creating something with my hands. This led to relearning how to make my own art again. It all started with small pieces of art to jumpstart putting my frenzied mind on paper. Which led to me writing down short stories I concocted from pieces of nature I come across. That’s when I first got into slowly, and mindfully dotting out the images in my mind.
I found I spent a lot more time focused on one single activity which fed neither my restlessness nor my anxiety. It was calming and meditative. And the amount of focus meant I was more careful and had more intent in my tasks.
Wild, for me, is both reminiscence and recovery~
Germaine Chong (Shu)
@shu.anonymous