From the anonymity her creatures carry to the apprehension they face amid the various stages of transformation, struggles and change, the exhibition explores the psychological landscape of a coming-of-age that is simultaneously reassuring and disquieting.
Tales of the Metamorphosis of the Unnamed is an exhibition that brings an overview to the breadth of Geraldine Lim’s budding practice, spanning from drawings to sculpture, as well as early experiments into an NFT artwork of animation and video. A series of recent drawings and paintings are on view, which continue to reflect her characteristic style and motifs of creatures that seem to form a discontinuous chain of enigmatic tales. Her narratives take inspiration from everyday life that innocuously weave together ordinary scenarios with the imagined, expressing a somewhat fantastical and uncanny world of her own. She draws on the developmental stages of frogs to create her creatures and the different environments within flora and fauna that they come to inhabit and metamorphosize. Such metamorphosis is less about physical or ouvert change but psychological and emotional transformation that transpires through the various stories her works tell. These unfolding of these stories seem to be reinforced by the texts displayed throughout the gallery space, which are original writings of Lim’s own. While they do not necessarily relate to specific drawings as pretexts, they reveal the synergetic relationship between and across different mediums within the artist’s creative process, providing a cohesive understanding to Lim’s artistic vernacular.
Much like the amorphous creature with feminine attributes that recurs throughout Lim’s work, Tales of the Metamorphosis of the Unnamed alludes to a sense of obscurity and uncertainty allegorical of our society. “I find the lip to be ambiguous and can be very expressive, which leaves no need for the creatures to have eyes. It adds allusiveness to the character as well.” Her soft sculptures, bearing resemblance to organs, further echo the artist’s abiding interest with orifices and limbs. She associates orifices and limbs with the notions of social anxiety and fear – of being consumed or touched by others. While her soft sculptures might seem inviting to touch, they actually reflect an underlying uneasiness towards interaction. Lim also draws on other literary sources such as Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis and The Seed to Harvest, and Women who run with the wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, which have informed the development of her distinctive creatures and their adventures. From the anonymity her creatures carry to the apprehension they face amid the various stages of transformation, struggles and change, the exhibition explores the psychological landscape of a coming-of-age that is simultaneously reassuring and disquieting.
Tales of the Metamorphosis of the Unnamed evokes a wide-eyed innocence that hints at something grotesque, yet paradoxically strives towards a sense of solace in Lim’s peculiar and fabled world.
