Little Rituals, Jacqui Poncelet

Cities contain a density of information: sounds, sights, smells and movements of every kind. People, cars, animals, and plants inhabit the ground, interspersed by the solid mass of buildings. Things float or fly around in the air, a mixture of the mobile and the static, the hard and the soft, the permanent and the transitory. Within this scene endless subtle nuances play, barely noticed invitations to the senses to pause and enjoy the moment; a shadow on a wall, flickering sunlight on a puddle, the spiralling decent of a leaf, the sweet sound of bird song. Sometimes we notice but choose not to see, hear but choose not to listen. Filtering how much we want to know, what to notice, how to respond, happens minute by minute every day of our lives. Human beings often choose to dwell in their imaginative worlds rather than the here and now. What would life be like without fantasy? How important it is to be capable, in the mind's eye, of holding reality at bay and formulating a new world order . . .

Suki Chan is a dreamer and her installations are of another world where beauty is pulled forward and chaos is pushed back. Her installations have a light touch. They are delicate in their physical nature and in their approach to the subjects she hints at. A lover of narrative, she takes pleasure in momentary realities, fleeting events, dreams, shadows, flocks of birds and teeming ants. Unlike the work of artists such as Martin Creed who focus on the everyday events of turning a light on and off, or opening and closing a door, Chan invites us to dream with her and travel into the extraordinary, towards a bewitching utopia. The work seems benign in its vision of a blend of cultures flying towards a common goal. Sadly we know that reality is much more complicated and this soft-focus world actually belongs in dreams or self-delusion.

All the pieces in this exhibition have been made or exhibited in one place, and are now being shown in another. Work can be moved from place to place, of course, but the original intentions and the possible interpretations will change with the new location and audience. All of these works include a rogue element that distances them from us, like the arrival of the outsider in the fairy tale. In this installation it is the curious coexistence of elements such as a very familiar pattern, only it's drawn in rice. Or a film of the ordinary moon, clouds and reflections in water, which is accompanied by a sound-track implying otherness, and includes the image of an unexpected materialisation. Are these installations only about fantasy, or do they recognise some essential aspect of the constant travel and movement of people in the contemporary world, where we are faced with the continuous juxtapositions of the familiar and the unfamiliar?

Identity, is a subject that becomes increasingly interesting in the context of contemporary England where the larger cities incorporate great racial diversity. Many people are aware of duality in their personal identity; for some people this split arises from the differences between the culture they were born into, and the one they now inhabit. For others the dualism is imposed by the preconceptions of outsiders. One of the positive sides of cultural duality lies in the scope it allows for forming relationships that are simultaneously close and distant; being able to view a society from the inside and the outside, through a myriad of contrasts and comparisons.

Food, and its preparation, lies at the heart of most cultures. A vast proportion of the world has rice as its staple food, and with the increasing diversity of immigrants to England, we have begun to notice the huge variety of types of rice that exist. Rice is a substance, and also a material, that speaks of distance, travel and difference. By its physical nature it can also represent ideas of the mass and the individual. It is used throughout the world in the production of food, drink, preservative, starch, and glue. It is used as a granular filling for floppy toys and is thrown over brides to bring good luck. For some people just to have enough of it to eat would be complete satisfaction. People would risk their lives in the attempt to travel to where they might achieve that sufficiency.

Rice is a material that Suki Chan likes to use. Her selection of this metaphorical material will make some people feel close to the work; for others it will conjure up distance. Chan takes pleasure in the appearance of rice as well as its potency as a symbol. She uses it in piles, and she applies it a grain at a time, like the strokes of a pen loaded with invisible ink. People have written about the meditative qualities of a repetitive task such as weaving, but what are we to understand from this exhaustive application of white grains of rice onto a white fabric ground, producing at the end a barely visible image? We are offered tantalising glimpses of something beautiful that is more evident in the shadow it casts, than in itself. Repetition, things done time and again, hour after hour, creates a mesmeric wonder in the viewer at the artist's patient concentration and drive to bring the thing laboriously, enchantingly, into being. Work like this reads as a measure of such serious intent; each grain marking a passing moment. Or a loving gesture repeated again and again like a caress; each grain is placed so precisely to recreate the swirling patterns of familiar curtain fabric. When the work is barely visible, it also says: can you believe it? - look again. It's near-absence is captivating, and elusively suggests that here is something strange to think about, watch and wonder…
Stories, fables and myths are the underlying catalysts for Chan's work - take her invitation to add your own experience to her imaginings.

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