Canvas:
This work is created on traditional Burmese fabric, whose bold woven patterns establish both the visual rhythm and conceptual foundation of the painting. The textile references cultural identity, domestic labor, and social order, functioning not only as a background but as an active structure through which memory and history are negotiated.
Technique:
Acrylic painting is combined with archival newspaper clippings and historical photographic imagery, collaged directly onto the fabric surface. The paint is applied in a way that allows the textile’s pattern to remain visible, ensuring that fabric, image, and figure coexist without hierarchy. The collage elements are integrated into the body of the figure rather than layered on top, binding material history to the painted form.
Process:
The work develops through a gradual layering of paint and paper, embedding fragments of media and documentation into the figure’s torso and arms. Newspapers are cut, positioned, and sealed into the surface, allowing text and image to partially disappear beneath acrylic layers. This process mirrors the way headlines fade from public view while remaining embedded in personal and collective memory.
Artwork Description:
Burying Yesterday’s Headlines confronts the tension between remembrance and erasure, focusing on how historical narratives are absorbed, concealed, and carried by the body. The female figure stands upright against a field of vibrant woven patterns, her posture composed yet weighted. Her arms wrap around a form made of newspaper and archival imagery, holding it close to her chest as if protecting—or suppressing—its contents.
The collaged newspapers and historical photographs form both the object she holds and parts of her own body, collapsing the distinction between bearer and burden. History here is not distant or abstract; it is pressed against the heart, partially obscuring the figure’s torso, suggesting an intimate struggle between preservation and the desire to bury what has already been lived.
The red patterned Burmese fabric behind her evokes urgency, repetition, and unrest. Its rhythmic vertical lines echo cycles of political events and media narratives that rise, circulate, and are quickly replaced. Within this charged environment, the act of holding becomes ambiguous—both an attempt to contain the past and a refusal to let it disappear entirely.
The work reflects on how headlines fade, yet their impact endures within personal and collective memory. By merging the female body with archival material, the painting asserts that even when stories are buried, they remain carried—embedded in lived experience, resisting complete silence.
