Nicolette Lim
nicolettelim.com
nicolettelim.com
Seeds of Our Flesh
charred wood, chalk, gouache, mixed media
2020
charred wood, chalk, gouache, mixed media
2020
This work was part of an installation in my exhibition Strange Harvest. The exhibition explores the present day effects of inherited colonizer era laws in my home country Malaysia and it’s myth of inevitability. These inherited myths from our colonizers of how things should be, continue to employ violence towards women, the LGBT community as well as our natural environment. The setting for the narrative is the annual August haze in Malaysia, a direct result of slash and burn practices introduced in the mid 20th century by the colonizers. The haze would be so thick that the sun would be lost and the air was painful to breathe. Within this context, I create a narrative exposing memories of my girlhood on negotiating my sexual identity and gender performance as a queer person in Malaysian academic institutions while wading through a haze where I could only see my own two feet.
Artist Statement
The larger theme of my work involves the annual unregulated slash-burnings in the Sumatras that has been in practice by the palm oil industry since the 1980’s. The fires result in a haze that blankets Southeast Asian countries such as my own, Malaysia. As a child I had assumed the August haze was an inevitable result of nature, like rainfall or the sunset. It was the norm to see dead birds littering the ground, their small bodies crushed from human step; it wasn’t enough that we had taken their breath away too.
The slash and burn method was originally implemented by European colonizers, unfamiliar with our soils and ancient rainforest. The method begins by cutting down the trees and woody plants in an area. The downed vegetation, or "slash", is then left to dry, usually right before the rainiest part of the year. The biomass is burned, resulting in a nutrient-rich layer of ash which makes the soil superficially fertile. After about three to five years, the plot's productivity decreases due to depletion of nutrients, causing the farmers to abandon the field and move over to a new area. The time it takes for the land to recover can be as little as five years (this is mostly in regions north of the hemisphere, with younger forest and looser soils) to more than twenty years.Often fires get out of hand, encroaching into protected lands. Because Sumatran land is made up of ancient rainforest, with dense, clay-like soil, it takes much longer to recover, leaving mass amounts of land desolate and open to erosion, yet it continues to be used by Palm Oil industries due it’s cost efficiency.
In Malaysia, oppressive laws pertaining to LGBTQ rights and gender performance have also been inherited by our British colonizers. These laws and attitudes against queerness and femininity have continued to be implemented today. Growing up queer under that stifling political climate while watching the people in my community fall, was enough for me to want to fly away before the haze of oppression took me too. I am interested in drawing parallels between this inherited myth of inevitable ecological destruction and the destruction enacted towards the queer community and women.
The larger theme of my work involves the annual unregulated slash-burnings in the Sumatras that has been in practice by the palm oil industry since the 1980’s. The fires result in a haze that blankets Southeast Asian countries such as my own, Malaysia. As a child I had assumed the August haze was an inevitable result of nature, like rainfall or the sunset. It was the norm to see dead birds littering the ground, their small bodies crushed from human step; it wasn’t enough that we had taken their breath away too.
The slash and burn method was originally implemented by European colonizers, unfamiliar with our soils and ancient rainforest. The method begins by cutting down the trees and woody plants in an area. The downed vegetation, or "slash", is then left to dry, usually right before the rainiest part of the year. The biomass is burned, resulting in a nutrient-rich layer of ash which makes the soil superficially fertile. After about three to five years, the plot's productivity decreases due to depletion of nutrients, causing the farmers to abandon the field and move over to a new area. The time it takes for the land to recover can be as little as five years (this is mostly in regions north of the hemisphere, with younger forest and looser soils) to more than twenty years.Often fires get out of hand, encroaching into protected lands. Because Sumatran land is made up of ancient rainforest, with dense, clay-like soil, it takes much longer to recover, leaving mass amounts of land desolate and open to erosion, yet it continues to be used by Palm Oil industries due it’s cost efficiency.
In Malaysia, oppressive laws pertaining to LGBTQ rights and gender performance have also been inherited by our British colonizers. These laws and attitudes against queerness and femininity have continued to be implemented today. Growing up queer under that stifling political climate while watching the people in my community fall, was enough for me to want to fly away before the haze of oppression took me too. I am interested in drawing parallels between this inherited myth of inevitable ecological destruction and the destruction enacted towards the queer community and women.