Trophy

Trophy, 2024, bronze cast of a ginger root, timber plinth. 190 x 40 x 40cm  

Trophy explores my Australian–Singaporean heritage alongside the legacies of colonisation in South-East Asia, focusing on the historical and ongoing impacts of the colonial spice trades. Informed by Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse, the work reflects on how violent conquest over land, people and plants was pursued throughout Asia by Dutch and British colonial powers.

The sculpture comprises a comically oversized plinth supporting a humble ginger root cast in bronze. This exaggerated display highlights the absurdity of colonial conquest, playfully unsettling the ways violent histories have been celebrated, monumentalised and retold.

The plinth draws on the visual language of museums and art history, operating as a metaphor for the institutional frameworks which record and order history. Within my practice, these structures become a way of questioning how memories, objects and inherited histories are contained, held and arranged.