Canvas:
This work is created using traditional Myanmar men’s fabric, a material less frequently used in the artist’s practice. Historically associated with masculinity, public life, and social authority, the textile introduces a deliberate shift in material language. Its woven patterns establish both visual rhythm and cultural grounding, referencing domestic labor, continuity, and collective memory. Used here as a living surface, the fabric challenges gendered associations embedded within Myanmar’s textile traditions.
Technique:
The work is constructed from two distinct surfaces: one half composed of archival photographic collage on canvas, and the other of Myanmar fabric. These sections are physically sewn together and painted over with acrylic. The female figure is rendered across both materials, allowing her silhouette to remain clearly visible while her body blends into and absorbs the underlying surfaces. Acrylic paint is applied in a way that preserves the visibility of both the woven textile and the documentary imagery, creating transparency and overlap between body, fabric, and history.
Process:
The work develops through assembling, stitching, and layering. Archival photographs and newspaper clippings are first collaged onto canvas, forming a dense field of recorded history. This surface is then sewn together with the fabric panel, establishing a physical and conceptual seam. The figure is painted last, unifying the two halves while remaining partially permeable to what lies beneath. Through this process, past and present are bound together, allowing memory to surface through the body while remaining fragmented and incomplete.
Artwork Description:
From Woven Fine to Silken Twine for Soul Divine reflects on courage as something accumulated rather than declared. The work considers how strength is formed through continuity, inheritance, and the presence of others who came before. The figure does not stand alone; she is shaped, supported, and held by layers of collective experience embedded within the work.
Courage here is not depicted as confrontation or spectacle, but as endurance — the capacity to remain visible, steady, and present within layered histories. The use of men’s fabric introduces a quiet tension, placing a female body within material traditions historically coded as masculine, and subtly reconfiguring the spaces in which courage is allowed to exist.
By merging textile, archival material, and the female form, the work positions courage as a shared condition — documented, carried, and sustained over time. It is not something possessed individually, but something sewn together through memory, labor, and continued presence.
