The ‘Third Space’ (series) is my personal sanctuary where black ink cuts through the toughest skin and ‘Fingernails’ regenerates on a ‘clearing’, an experience that is affective and transformative.

 

The ‘Fingernail flowers' came from a distant memory of being placed in a foreign environment when I was a child. Living away from my family and only being able to go home at the weekend was a big thing for me. The 'Fingernail Flowers' played a special role in my journey home. The flowers helped me mark the location where I once stood to wait for my mother at the end of each school week, at the foot of a wall covered with 'Fingernail flowers'. I remember them as small hardy-looking yellow flowers with ridiculously long tongues sticking out from their centres. My mother would refer to them as 'Bunga Jari Kuku' [Fingernail flowers] in the Malay language, simply because she did not know the real name of the plant. Today, the ‘fingernails’ have been transplanted into clusters of small blueish-purple blooms wrapped around the big tree now growing in my garden here in the UK, and in the cascading Sage.

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I chanced upon that bouquet of cascading Sage in the middle of Cambridge, its meandering vines crawling all over the stone pavement. It appeared so free and wild, yet so full of rigour and conviction. It seemed to know where it was going. It didn't take long before I realised that I was anthropomorphising them. I used to think that about the Bougainvillea, knotty and twisted, its 'tentacles' going all over the place.

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Growing up in sunny Singapore, I saw Bougainvillea everywhere. It could be found along the roadside, over the bridges and pavilions, around cafes and coffeeshops, in front of houses and around blocks of flats. It came in burst of orange, yellow, red, fuchsia, magenta, and sometimes white. Although Bougainvillea was not native to Singapore, its omnipresence was undeniable. It has been years since I saw one basking under the sun. For as much as I long to see the gnarly, sinewy branches and papery flowers of the Bougainvillea, I could only envisage its shadows, right beneath the clusters of the small blueish-purple blooms.