A lot can shape you when you have spent 15 years in a country – culture, strangers, history, identity, structures, materials, streets, sex, distance.
So it’s only fitting that after spending much of your professional career as an artist and a teacher in a country you’ve called home, your final solo exhibition explores identity, gender, family and the connection to self through artworks that are comprised of a little bit of naughty pornography, wood, knickers and prints of your naked self.
As she prepares to leave a country where most of her best work and memories have been made, and where she has taught art to Primary and Secondary school students throughout her time here, Ann Healey’s final bricolage, titled 51, is her boldest, most left-field existentialist work to date.
51 refers to the percentage of the population who are women.
“Would you like some tea? Coffee? Cider?” she asked as she swept her leg between her bedroom door and her cat. “Wouldn’t want the cat scratching all the artwork,” she said, smiling tiredly as she prepared for this interview in her apartment on the edge of Little India. I wondered if the tiredness was from the late nights working, obsessing over rare groove and soul records on eBay or the heaviness in her heart that the interview would likely centre on her last exhibition in Singapore, a place she calls home. Nonetheless, she’s extremely open to talk about her work in her extremely well-arranged apartment as Eugene McDaniels’ Supermarket Blues plays faintly from her iMac.
For her three sets of work, the multi-disciplined Healey, who enjoys the challenge of working with different materials, uses various materials such as perspex, wood, yarn, beads, flowers and fabric. But it’s the first time she has used her own body in her artwork almost metaphorically leaving a little bit of herself in Singapore.
“It’s specifically the portrayal of women as sexualised beings,” said Healey as she shuffled through some of her pieces on the bedroom floor.
“In the experience of being a woman, we’re always aware of our own sexual identity, whether we’re growing up and learning and when men start to look at us.”
“The artist is for sale so if maybe if you don’t push personal boundaries, then you’re not really saying anything. I think the job of the artist is to say something.Ann Healey
In the first set of her collection, Healey transfers stills from classic pornography films onto her mother’s fabric as she begins the discourse of her own personal history and gender associations of femininity.
In the second part, Healey invites the viewer into her dialogue with her own image, printing her own torso onto the canvas as she addresses identity. These images of self, to her, are “more personal than a photograph”.
In the third, and what is probably the oddest yet most interesting discussion in her series, Healey hangs women’s underwear in a wooden box with a cut-out hole for all to see. The devil is in the detail as viewers are invited closer to voyeuristically gaze at the feminine undergarments that are sewn with messages from Healey.
“I began sewing as an attempt to reconnect with my maternal grandmother who passed away when I was three, but I discovered that it was the commencement of an exploration into self,” said Healey, who plays on semantics and material to subvert derogatory words that oppress women and their sexual identity by turning it into a sex positive.
As is wont of Healey, her final exhibition is not short of spurring discourse, thought and debate, and it represents her most personal and intimate work yet.
“The artist is for sale so if you don’t push personal boundaries, then you’re not really saying anything. I think the job of the artist is to say something.
“I’m putting images of myself up for that very same judgement other women are subjected to. And if I don’t use myself, then I’m just as guilty of that exploitation, even if I don’t have the guts to use myself,” said Healey.
“My wish is that if Singapore could translate their love of food for their love of art, all that passion and having such an opinion about food, then that would just be perfect.”Ann Healey
Asking Healey to look back at her time in Singapore is tough as memories overwhelm her mind, so asking her to remember her best exhibition is even tougher.
Over 15 years, Healey, who was named by Singapore’s main national newspaper as one of the artists to look out for, has held 13 solo exhibitions around Asia. She’s been commissioned by numerous prestigious brands and has also worked with the Singapore Art Museum and the National Arts Council, the Esplanade and LASALLE College of the Arts.
“Probably my most memorable exhibition here was my first. It was at the Four Seasons hotel and I was 26 and I can remember feeling really overwhelmed, but in a good way, by the whole experience,” recalled Healey.
“Having said that, I am hoping that my last show later this month will take that place. I have made so many amazing and supportive friends during my time in Singapore, and to have as many of those people come, to what will possibly be my last show here, will be really special.”
After Singapore, Healey has her sights on the US right after she spends family time back in England, and she says she’ll continue to nurture a love for art and creative thinking in children as she has done in Singapore, a country whose artistic landscape has changed right before her eyes.
“I think Singapore has adopted and acknowledged the importance of the arts since I first arrived, and my personal feeling is that you can’t be a successful scientist or mathematician unless you can think creatively.
“And that’s something I want children to understand. Singapore is acknowledging that by putting a lot of money in the arts and children need art as importantly as they need the sports and the maths and the science.
“My wish is that if more Singaporeans could translate their love of food for their love of art, all that passion and having such an opinion about food, then that would just be perfect.”
Ann Healey’s final Singapore exhibition, titled 51, sponsored by Commune Bistro and Caffee Beviamo, and supported by Inhabit, will be held at Artspace@Helutrans from May 22 to May 25. The show’s opening on May 22 will begin at 6.30pm
