Acknowledgements
My sincere and heartfelt thanks to: Professor Ng Woon Lam for his guidance, generous advice and constant support. I would like to thank him for taking time to review my works and crafting such a wonderful recommendation. Doctor Pwee Keng Hock for his support, time and effort in putting up a solo exhibition for my creations at Utterly Art gallery, as well as his comprehensive foreword. G S Art Framing for their most efficient and high quality framing services. Ms. Jeannette Foo for her thorough proofreading and editing efforts. Funbie Studios and friends, who have in one way or another made this entire process a unique and extraordinary one. AIR Frosterus, its Cultural Cooperative and the friends I made in Finland, for the opportunities and support throughout my artist residency. My parents for life, love and education.
Imagine That! Should you care to endeavour, in this illustrative venture, you shall then soon discover, what Imagination has to offer. In hidden cranny and nook, In such plain sight we look, Keep a little sense of wonder, what those shapes could take after. We first find the window(s) to their souls. the silmä they call it, how many of those? And then we decide on how they move around, though some might prefer just sitting down. Tell me about this Olento, what do you see? Is it furry or scaly or dotty as can be? Perhaps some pattern or crease on their skin. My, my where do we begin? Pick a väri, any one kind. Fill all the empty spaces you find. Over and over, dark to light, and you’ll have yourself the most wondrous sight. Behold! A creature of imagination! We must record this spectacular creation. When was it discovered, and from whence it came, tell the World its imaginary name. Should you think this the end of the line, just because we’ve ran out of time. Then you haven’t been listening well, For imagination is a never ending spell. Trivia Goh
Kärsämäki’s Secret
Contents 13567891011-
Foreword Review Preface About the Artist The Beginning The Finnish Experience The Singaporean Experience The System The Story of Everything
Foreword
Foreword
Utterly Art has long had a history of supporting and exhibiting emerging artists. We have mounted innumerable first solo shows for artists: for those freshly graduated from art school, and for those with no academic training whatsoever, but who wanted to share their precious, inspired creations with the world. Where different galleries might have required their artists to have long CVs and several awards, Utterly Art accepts artists purely on the strength and excellence of the artwork they wish to show. I have long believed that our early success as an exhibition space was as a pent-up outlet for several Singapore artists who desired the formal exposition of a first solo show. It is our good fortune that several have continued to work us over the years, and become identified with the gallery. And so it was just a few months ago that Trivia Goh paid a visit to the gallery to show me her work, and we fixed a schedule that very day for this solo exhibition. Kärsämäki’s Secret II is not Trivia’s first solo but her third, although it is her first with a private commercial gallery. Trivia harvests shapes from the environment around her, and through sketching and development, converts them into a menagerie of other-worldly creatures of jaunty insouciance, her own personal Pokedex, as it were. This catalogue she has prepared is replete with photographs of her process, and is one of the best documented I have seen explaining a young artist’s journey. You, the audience, will be the culmination of that journey, and I wish you thorough visual delectation! Dr Pwee Keng Hock Director Utterly Art
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Review
Review
What a joyful experience to review Miss Trivia Goh’s solo exhibition artworks. I love her positivist approach in creating art. Struggling with every aspect of life added to the creative challenge, and yet she is able to invent such a series of cheerful and imaginative pieces. The most significant output is how she is capable of subtly presenting the dark side of her deeply sophisticated ideas. This reflects her high level of thoughtfulness resembling any established masters in art.
The Scandinavians have a high level of perceptiveness that comes from their highly innovatary structure in their educational system for young students. Trivia has picked up on that sensitivity well during her brief period of residency at Finland. I am glad that she has paid good attention to the differences as compared to Singapore and is able to bring in such great amount of educational art resources for our learning here.
I feel immense pride and honour to have mentored her during her educational journey at School of Art, Design and Media in Nanyang Technological University. She has since made a quantum leap from a fresh graduate to a mature fine artist as well as an allrounded designer. I never believe that a fine artist has to only focus on a certain form of fine art approach. Here, Trivia truly exerts her sensibility as a skilful designer. Her professional knowledge complements her new series of creation in the execution of colours and design layouts. Fauvist colour master Henri Matisse understands the challenge of juxtaposing pure colours. To maintain a ‘calm’ designed image with ‘dancing’ colourful shapes was Matisse’s challenge during the last part of his artistic journey. I am amazed with Trivia’s explorations of a similar level of challenge. The colourful series of artworks are exuberant and fresh with risky combinations of pure colours. The results are amazingly stable which truly reflect Trivia’s design capacity. The black and white series, on the other hand, serve as a wonderful discovery of form and exploration of her imaginative world.
It is a great oeuvre from her short adventure in Finland and I am lucky to be one of the very first few to have a glance at her latest collection. I encourage every artist and art lover to visit her coming solo exhibition and hereby wish her a wonderful art journey and a successful exhibition.
Ng Woon Lam, NWS AWS-DF Assistant Professor School of Art, Design and Media Nanyang Technological University
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Preface
Left
: View from bedroom window at the artists’ residence, Papilla. Right : View from behind Papilla.
Preface This exhibition is a culmination of a year’s effort in creating and getting strangers to create alongside me. A whole year of head-banging, U-turns and detours. I’m glad to be where I am, sharing my art with you.
In a sense, this series of works is deeply personal and a product of my own narratives. I hope that you would enjoy this exhibition and sincerely welcome feedback from one and all. Thank you very much.
Over time, as I stay in one place for too long, the grind of life starts to set in. It gets difficult to notice and recognise trivialities because I tend to just gloss over them. So I took a leap and travelled solo to a foreign land, thinking the fresh perspective would help. And indeed, during my residency in Finland, the small, subtle intricacies began popping up again. I took every bit of information to be new and fascinating. It didn’t take a lot for me to present them in a significant way because they already appear so to me.
Yours truly, Goh Shi Ya, Trivia Artist
Subsequently after I returned, I got to see Singapore in a different light. There is a richer understanding of the ongoings and minutiae of everyday life.
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About the Artist
: Kärsämäki’s Secret,Arthouse Nahkuri 2016.
About the Artist Born in 1991, Trivia Goh is a Singapore based artist. Her works revolve around the search for little things to present in a big way. She uses watercolour and ink for quick thumb-nailing and drafts. Her primary medium of choice is charcoal. Trivia’s works tend towards the whimsical, often portraying otherworldly characters and beings as if to document them having had a place in her casual daydreaming world.
Exhibitions 2016 Solo Exhibition, “Kärsämäki’s Secret”. Arthouse Nahkuri, Kärsämäki, Finland. 2016 Solo Exhibition, “Nightmares are Made of This”. Library@Orchard, Singapore. 2015 Group Exhibition, “Sunday Showcase”. ArtScience Museum, Singapore. Education 2011 - 2015 Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) Visual Communication. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
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The Beginning
The Beginning In march 2016, I embarked on a short trip to Finland for an artist residency program. The idea was to seek new conversations and experiences, and make something out of them. It was a short time frame of 4 weeks and in that period I came up with a system for me to process the observations, explorations and narratives of my life in a far-off land. This system’s input were these unassuming shapes we find in our immediate surroundings and the output took the form of strange, imaginary creatures. I went on to write a step by step manual on how to capture these “elusive beings� via illustration and conducted workshops based on that manual for people of all ages. There was an exhibition held at the Arthouse Nahkuri towards the end of my residency, showcasing works of mine alongside works of all participants of the workshop. It is hard to believe these all came from a singular process, but they all did.
: Photos compiled from first explorations in shape hunting in Finland.
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The Finnish Experience
The Finnish Experience There’s a lot of solitude in Finland because people are few and far apart in the vast expanse of snowcovered land. And I remember just embracing it, accepting the solace nature brings. That was when I first started to take greater notice of the little things that were happening. Everything that was passing me by as I walked to get food, to conduct workshops in the school, to visit new friends, I brought it all back with me to the studio and I got to work on the shapes I found with this variety of influences. It was a wonderful period of discovery for me. I think if you go through the works I created there, you get this little piece of my Finnish travelogue.
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The Singaporean Experience
The Singaporean Experience Coming home was a welcomed change. It was like getting off one amusement park ride and jumping onto the next. Amidst the hustling to stay afloat, I sought to conduct the same workshops back home and expand on my series of charcoal creatures. The goal was to hold a part two of this exhibition, contrasting works done in Finland with those created in Singapore, to show how the environment and the experience of it affects my works. As the pace of city life set in, it seemed necessary to keep up and it gets comparatively harder to stop and smell the roses. Five pieces were conceived in rare moments of clarity where I could promptly translate an observation or a thought into my creations.
Top : “Imagine That” workshop, Library@Orchard. Left : “Imagine That” workshop, Papilla Studio.
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The System
The System I’m for imagination as a main ingredient in art. But too many a times I’ve heard “I have no imagination so I cannot draw”; and that should never be the case. Imagination is an internal Q and A monologue you have with yourself as you make each decision to add to or subtract from the artwork. And so when I conducted workshops, I broke down the creation process into steps which anyone can follow. Every step posed a basic question to the participants, guiding that Q and A session. “Where are its eyes? How many eyes? How does it move around? Where does it come from”… etc. It definitely took the edge off people who were less confident of their artistic abilities. This series of questions is woven into a poem, and then made into a tiny manual. It forms a framework for creating a creature from a shape. It brings participants through shape hunting, adding features, colouring and texturing. At the end, mere shapes will be brought into existence as imaginary beings, given names and dates of birth.
Left Centre Right
“Where are its eyes? How many eyes? How does it move around? Where does it come from”… In a similar fashion, I created my charcoal series. Small log books were kept for the purposes of thumb-nailing creatures on the go. The ones that spoke the loudest to me were then done in watercolour and charcoal. For the larger pieces, multiple iterations were created to test a certain texture or form before the final work is produced and even in that process, certain characteristics were added on, omitted or simply redefined.
: Participant of workshop at Toa payoh Public Library. : “Imagine That!” workshop manuals. : Participant of workshop in Papilla, Finland.
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The System
Above
: Compilation of thumbnail creatures in logbooks
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The Story of Everything
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The Story of Everything
“Small log books were kept for the purposes of thumb-nailing creatures on the go. The ones that spoke the loudest to me were then done in watercolour and charcoal.�
All : Compilation of thumbnail sketches in logbooks
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The Story of Everything
Left Right
: Finnish students at the 2016 exhibition. : Workshop participants sharing stories.
“ It seems almost instinctive that we would weave narratives the moment we see something not so familiar.�
The Story of Everything Often times I would listen, with much relish, to the stories made up by the audience when they cast eyes on the works. It seems almost instinctive that we would weave narratives the moment we see something not so familiar. For documentation purposes, each charcoal creation has its own date, time and place of discovery recorded. With this information follows a short narrative of how it came to be. The watercolour works however, are more open ended, with the smaller ones left untitled to give viewers the freedom of interpretation.
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The Story of Everything
“ For the larger pieces, multiple iterations were created to test a certain texture or form before the final work is produced...”
Top Bottom
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: Testing “Lifler“ : Testing “Stagmy“
The Story of Everything
: Tyki Kärsämäki’s Secret, 2016 60 x 90cm Charcoal on Paper 7th March 2016, 15:25, shape from frozen snow on the front steps of Pappila
Tyki is a rabbit-fish hybrid inspired by the first impressions of the Kärsämäki suburbs and its brimming wildlife. I was told the frozen river behind my residence is full of fishes and we’d find fresh tracks on the snow every other morning. On several occassions, I saw the tracks of a rabbit.
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The Story of Everything
: Pok Kärsämäki’s Secret, 2016 60 x 90cm Charcoal on Paper 2nd March 2016, 16:57, shape from blemish on studio bench in Pappila
Pok was one of the first thumbnail shapes that was worked on and replicated in a larger scale. I was just getting accustomed to being wrapped in multiple layers before heading outdoors and experiencing goosebumps indoors. This period of adjustment to Kärsämäki’s sub zero temperatures lent its influences to Pok’s body structure and texture.
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The Story of Everything
: Phaigrus Kärsämäki’s Secret, 2016 90 x 60cm Charcoal on Paper 15th March 2016, 14:07, shape from paint blotch on a board in the school’s art room Immediately after seeing this shape, I felt an urgent need to draw a line that runs from the tail to the head of the creature to hold it together. It was later named Phaigrus, a loose abbreviation for Pythagoras a mathematician whose theorem applies to right angled triangles. Phaigrus’s selectively positioned scaly armour was added on when the I discovered how immensely dry and flaky my skin had become in a short span of two weeks.
: Jolla Kärsämäki’s Secret, 2016 90 x 60cm Charcoal on Paper 4th March 2016, 18:13, shape from a small heap of snow on top of an electrical box behind Pappila. On 2 separate occassions,I was informed of longhaired cows that reside in Kärsämäki. Though I never got round to visiting the cattle, I had in mind an image of those tresses. Concurrently, I developed a deep fascination for branches poking out of snow and their gentle shadows which explains the middle segment of Jolla’s coat.
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The Story of Everything
“... of bare raspberry bushes,trees chopped for firewood, sauna and bonfire.”
: Mooshkin Kärsämäki’s Secret, 2016 60 x 90cm Charcoal on Paper 22nd March 2016, 13:26, shape from blemish on the teachers’ table of the school’s art room
One afternoon, I found myself at Porkkala by invite from a finnish friend. It was a small village in the suburb some kilometers from the center. That day I got to experience traditional finnish sauna and witness first hand the way of living in such areas. Mooshkin is made up of experiences for that particular day, of bare raspberry bushes, trees chopped for firewood, sauna and bonfire. 19
The Story of Everything
: Sheets Kärsämäki’s Secret, 2017 90 x 60cm Charcoal on Paper 1st November 2016, 18:01, shape from oil stain on the road
Sheets is a sloth-like creature with bedsheets for skin folds. This creature was created during a period of semi burn-out. The weather was starting to cool with frequent light showers in the late afternoon that makes one dependent on bed warmth. It was not uncommon to start the day at 4pm at that point in time.
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The Story of Everything
: Fetas Kärsämäki’s Secret, 2017 60 x 90cm Charcoal on Paper 23rd August 2016, 11:45, shape from marble tile in parents’ toilet
I came across several ultrasound scans in succession on facebook, posted by my friends, and it hit me that my generation was busy entering a new phase of adulthood. If it wasn’t to do with firstborns, it would be about career stability. This transition is not without fatigue. Fetas is a reflection of all our tired selves, comfortably in a shell of commitments that acts as both barrier and insurance.
: Callaby Kärsämäki’s Secret, 2017 90 x 60cm Charcoal on Paper 16th September 2016, 20:40, shape from paint stain on studio floor near entrance Back in Finland, I liked telling people that there are no four seasons in Singapore and the trees and flora remain green all 365 days a year. I particularly enjoyed introducing them to tropical fruits like durian and dragon fruit. Callaby is a celebration of these simple fascinations to all things new.
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The Story of Everything
: Stagmy Kärsämäki’s Secret, 2017 90 x 60 cm Charcoal on Paper 5th February 2017 17:20, shape from army uniform
In late September 2016, I stumbled upon roadblocks. The U-turns brought me back to square one. I felt confused because I was constantly moving but it seemed like I was getting nowhere just like a rocking chair, just like Stagmy.
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The Story of Everything
: Lifler Kärsämäki’s Secret, 2017 60 x 90cm Charcoal on Paper 5th February 2016 17:20, shape from stain on train towards Bugis.
Lifler is all about the first moments of an unusually early day. I got up that morning before dawn, to gentle drizzle that could only be seen against the street lights. It was the same kind of magic I experienced with silent snow in Finland. My mother was getting ready for work with her usual floral fragrance .
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The Story of Everything
The -er Series The -er Series comprise of five creatures done up in watercolor. The audience is invited to take visual cues from the creature’s painted environment and appearances. The names given end with an -er which suggests what the creature does, albeit in a non-imposing way. In this manner, each viewer comes up with a unique perspective and narrative of what is presented.
Top : Thumbnail sketch I Bottom : Thumbnail sketch II
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The Story of Everything
: The Dewer 25 x 32.5cm Watercolor on Paper 25
The Story of Everything
: The Sheeper 25 x 32.5cm Watercolor on Paper 26
The Story of Everything
: The Snouter 25 x 32.5cm Watercolor on Paper 27
The Story of Everything
: The Floffer 25 x 32.5cm Watercolor on Paper 28
The Story of Everything
: The Strider 25 x 32.5cm Watercolor on Paper 29
The Story of Everything
The Untitled 15 selected smaller watercolor pieces are showcased along with the rest of the works. In this series, I left it to the viewer to take hints from the creature’s environment, appearance and interaction with another subject. We see creatures interacting with humans engaged in simple acts like dancing or snoozing. While the creatures may have been given names, the pieces remain untitled to give viewers free rein on their interpretation. I welcome one and all to participate in conversations with one another about the narratives they arrived at.
All
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: Untitled, 14.9 x 21cm Watercolor and ink on paper
The Story of Everything
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The Story of Everything
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The Story of Everything
All
: Untitled, 14.9 x 21 cm Watercolor and ink on paper
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Preface
Untitled,14.9 x 21cm Watercolor and ink on paper
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Preface
Untitled, 14.9 x 21cm Watercolor and ink on paper
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Trivia Goh Kärsämäki’s Secret Photography : Quek Jia Liang Leong Hanyang Jeannette Foo Design : Trivia Goh Proofreading : Jeannette Foo © 2017 Trivia Goh Printed in Singapore ISBN : 978-981-11-3079-3 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or published in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. trivialities.com.sg triviagoh@gmail.com.sg