Words and Images Camille Chua Tan
Editing The Kanto Team
“Thought Patterns” is Camille Chua Tan or Frillion’s beginning foray into experimenting with more personal and cerebral themes in multiple artistic mediums in ink art, acrylic paintings on canvas, and digital media.
Frillion was inspired by the concept of her studio room being both a hermitage and a portal for escape during the pandemic, allowing her to capture the opposing experience of the physical entrapment of architectural space, but also creating a fertile ground for the mind to “run wild” as captured through her art’s weaving synapses of shape and pattern created through paint and ink.
The acrylic paintings showcase oases enveloped in intricate, organic scaffolding full of color and form embracing pensive and meditative women, expressing “thought-full” moments of deliberate rumination. Wisps of soft pastel, applied through a finger’s touch create synapse-like patterns akin to thoughts racing within the brain. The paintings unveil the mind’s capacity to access new places of ideas and imagination through deep thought only if we create space to delve into them.
The framed limited series of small ink prints (7/7 editions, 6 artworks) on textured paper are individually embellished by hand, with colored acrylic marks that capture the frequency of thoughts that accompany people each day. The same “thoughtscapes” showcased in the canvas paintings are visualized in intimate ink sketch prints. These portray thoughts as small, frequent, and fleeting nooks that enrich our minds in daily life.
The looping digital video called “Thought Patterns: Daily Life” showcases the artist going about her day in the creation of the exhibit’s collection while in the pandemic. It provides a peek into the life of an artist and the space that nurtures her imagination and her craft while simultaneously being entrapped in the pandemic.
In a nutshell, the essence of the exhibit can be summarized through a saying that has informed Frillion throughout the creation of the collection: Life is what you think of. •
