What makes some of these local or global creatives tick? In this weekly column, Sarah Isabelle Tan shares her many inspirations and obsessions.
Photo credit: Sarah Isabelle Tan
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1. Roses: A skeleton of what once was, bearing the ghost of your kiss, a trace of your lips. The lingering touch of the past, as it touches me like the delayed rays of a star.
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2. Fields: The vast, endless field of gold. The world ahead of us.
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3. Terence Malick: His films- lyrical, drifting, non-linear narratives, play on light and the posing of existential questions of life itself have had enormous influence on my own practice and work. Always pondering, wondering, questioning.
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4. Harry Potter: Literally my entire childhood! I was a daydreamer and spent a lot of my childhood living in the fantasy wizarding world. I even believed an owl would come and deliver my letter to Hogwarts when I turned 11. [Laughs]
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5. Just Kids by Patti Smith: For me, this was such an intimate read and brought me to places, young love, of being an artist and the journey within, of making it within a big city, youth, fleeting moments and so much more.
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6. Seashells: I remember picking seashells off the black sands of the eastern shore of the Vatnsnes peninsula, in northwest Iceland. There was nothing ahead of me but the vast endless expanse of the ocean. In the distance I could see the blue of the mountains. It was dusk. In that very moment I felt truly still. I was where I was meant to be.
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7. A photographic darkroom: Within the enclosed space of the photographic darkroom, in the red sliver of light, it is what feels like an alternate state of time and space, a disjointed reality where I project, enlarge and lose myself in the inverted, hovering projection of light. A surrendering of myself to the wretched image that we try all too often to forget and remember.
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8. The Moth On the Night of His Death: It’s a cyanotype on a glass plate. This work is a re-representation and materialisation of a personal experience of loss five years prior to the making of the work. For me, it is a re-representation of an absence; a passing of distance into another distance.
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9. Blue skies: I remember the weightlessness of the clouds drifting among the pool of blue that day as if I could reach back in time and touch them once more. Sky and sea no longer. Only an endless endless blue.
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