10/08/2016

Credit

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.

― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

I started this morning with the feeling like everything was crumbling. I thought I was late to work, I was sweaty and disheveled, and I hadn't had my breakfast, the flipping beans just weren't cooking and I overstuffed my burrito. 'Start you day positive,' Mum called out after me over the balcony, and I made it a point to hunch my shoulders and stomp my way down the hill to show just how not alright I felt about things not being alright. I think the word for how I felt is 'nemesism'.

I got to work and I wasn't late (in fact I was the second person in the office) and Mum had helped me pack a smoothie, which was cold and sweet and perfect.

At lunch time, the person I was meant to meet was sick, and I decided against having lunch with the other interns. I just needed some time to be alone, so I took my falling-apart burritos (that tasted pretty darn delicious even without the beans) and ate them on the way to the Singapore Art Museum.

The Art Museum has an exhibition called Odyssey on at the moment, and it is nothing short of beautiful. As I watched the opening and closing petals of Choe U-Ram's Una Lumino Callidus Spiritus barnacle-flowers, I slowed my breath to follow them, in as the flower opened and my chest expanded, out as the flower closed and my my chest fluttered down.

The different waterscapes seen from the port-hole of a cabin in Wyn-Lyn Tan's Adrift 'create at once an intimate yet distant encounter with this most northerly circle of the Earth’s latitude' and remind me (how quickly I forget) that the world is bigger than my little desk and ready to be explored, a feeling reinforced by Pratchaya Phinthong's moveable window filled with water, earth and air (life in a box) which draws inspiration from Kepler-22b, the planet some 600 light years from Earth with water on its surface.

But mostly I just enjoy watching water move in Wyn Lyn Tan and Pratchaya Phinthong's pieces. Its flow is unceasing, but not harsh or intimidating. Peace like a river, or an ocean, or a little pane filled with water, sand and air.