Trivia Goh
One moment, Trivia Goh is making you a mug of strawberry-cupcake-flavoured tea in her studio near Arab Street, and the next, she is showing you a bunch of weird imaginary creatures and nightmares.
Visiting the up-and-coming artist - whose first solo exhibition opens on April 6, 2017 at Utterly Art gallery - is an experience as charming, whimsical and surreal as her art. Since graduating with a degree in visual communications from Nanyang Technological University in 2015, she has created works ranging from a commissioned military-themed mural at Mandai Hill Camp, to a self-published picture book inspired by the horror stories that parents tell their children to get them to behave. The book Nightmares are Made of This, which grew out of her final-year project, has since sold about half of its 500-copy print run, available at bookstores such as Kinokuniya and Woods in the Books.
In March 2016, she spent several weeks in Finland as an artist in residency at Art House Nahkuri, in the municipality of Kärsämäki. While there, she started running workshops on how to draw imaginary creatures out of random shapes - a programme she has also run at the public libraries in Singapore.
Visiting the up-and-coming artist - whose first solo exhibition opens on April 6, 2017 at Utterly Art gallery - is an experience as charming, whimsical and surreal as her art. Since graduating with a degree in visual communications from Nanyang Technological University in 2015, she has created works ranging from a commissioned military-themed mural at Mandai Hill Camp, to a self-published picture book inspired by the horror stories that parents tell their children to get them to behave. The book Nightmares are Made of This, which grew out of her final-year project, has since sold about half of its 500-copy print run, available at bookstores such as Kinokuniya and Woods in the Books.
In March 2016, she spent several weeks in Finland as an artist in residency at Art House Nahkuri, in the municipality of Kärsämäki. While there, she started running workshops on how to draw imaginary creatures out of random shapes - a programme she has also run at the public libraries in Singapore.
How did you start drawing imaginary creatures?
When I went to Finland, I needed an idea for a workshop, which would also enable me to document my travels, as well as produce works for an exhibition. I put that all together and came up with the idea to teach people to find shapes and make creatures.
You start by finding shapes all around – on the floor and walls; little dents and smudges. And then you decide which way is up. You add eyes. How many? What kind? After that, you logically go on to the rest of the facial features. Then you decide on how the creature moves around. Add legs. Then you add texture. After that, add colour to segment the body; to augment these sections. Towards the end, the steps will all blend into each other, and people will be very engrossed with this process.
When they are done, they will give it a name and note down the time, and where they found it. It’s a very simple exercise. You write down silly facts about each creature.
Which are some of your favourite creations?
One's named Phaigrus. I found this shape on a school art board in Finland. A paint blob. It was a right-angled kind of shape. When I saw it, I immediately thought of Pythagoras’ Theorem. I drew a diagonal line to turn it into a triangle. A few weeks into my Finnish residency, I noticed that my skin was becoming scaly and flaky from the dry weather. So I decided to give Phaigrus scales. It’s constantly sulky. Always sticking out its lower lip. I don’t think it’s very happy that I drew that line there. He’s all tied up with his own tail now.
Another creature is Callaby. It’s got a trunk and flowers. In Finland, I realised the people I met there didn’t know a lot about tropical fruits. They’d never seen dragonfruit and thought it was really cool. I really really liked telling people there – my friends from Spain and France – that Singapore had 365 days of summer, and that our flora is evergreen. All these little tidbits about Singapore that I enjoyed telling people overseas, I put into Callaby.
How did Finland inspire you?
The solitude was very good. My house was in the suburbs, there was a river behind me. It took about 40 minutes to walk to the city centre, and even then it was not very bustling. You could drive for two hours and not see a single vehicle there. The country is huge, and my neighbours were kilometres away.
My housemate was an Italian photographer. There were only two of us in the house. You don’t get too much human interaction, and you set a pace for yourself. And you really start to pick up little things along the way – little observations. The environment was also very different. We don’t get snow here. If I went out and saw a frozen shape on the floor, that was fascinating to me.
What is your aesthetic style?
It varies according to the media, and also what I’m trying to get at. I think my recent work is more whimsical. Otherworldly, I would say. It’s weird. But they seem pretty special, all of them.
My nightmares series is more controlled. You could go really gory, but it must serve a certain agenda.
If I were to work in pen or water colour, it’s very fast. That’ why I have so many watercolour works. Watercolour covers ground very fast, and the colour brings a certain personality to it. Charcoal needs more time: you need to ‘boil’ it a certain way – you work slowly and you mess it up. It’s a longer process. You have to work through it. You do something, and then you omit. You erase with the knead-able eraser. As opposed to adding, adding, adding.
The solitude was very good. My house was in the suburbs, there was a river behind me. It took about 40 minutes to walk to the city centre, and even then it was not very bustling. You could drive for two hours and not see a single vehicle there. The country is huge, and my neighbours were kilometres away.
My housemate was an Italian photographer. There were only two of us in the house. You don’t get too much human interaction, and you set a pace for yourself. And you really start to pick up little things along the way – little observations. The environment was also very different. We don’t get snow here. If I went out and saw a frozen shape on the floor, that was fascinating to me.
What is your aesthetic style?
It varies according to the media, and also what I’m trying to get at. I think my recent work is more whimsical. Otherworldly, I would say. It’s weird. But they seem pretty special, all of them.
My nightmares series is more controlled. You could go really gory, but it must serve a certain agenda.
If I were to work in pen or water colour, it’s very fast. That’ why I have so many watercolour works. Watercolour covers ground very fast, and the colour brings a certain personality to it. Charcoal needs more time: you need to ‘boil’ it a certain way – you work slowly and you mess it up. It’s a longer process. You have to work through it. You do something, and then you omit. You erase with the knead-able eraser. As opposed to adding, adding, adding.
When did you know you wanted to be an artist?
When I was really, really young. But it didn’t seem like a viable thing when I was growing up. I’ve always been in the science stream – in Pasir Ris Crest Secondary School and Tampines Junior College – but when I got retained a year in JC, my mum gave me the leeway to take whatever subjects I wanted, whatever it took to pass, so I took art. And I could copy very well, but that wasn’t good enough for ‘A’-levels. You needed to have very strong concepts.
When I was in university, at NTU's School Of Art, Design and Media, the thought of becoming an artist came back again. When I graduated, I thought: We’re going through a system our entire life. And I started to ask myself: why would you come out and go into another system all over again?
What themes interest you?
Most of my work deal with really small and insignificant things, and I always want to take that and show it to the audience in a very big way. Nightmares are Made of This is a book depicting the lies that parents offhandedly tell their children. It's not a severe enough issue to warrant a law to ban this practice, but I put them into a giant book to underscore the horrors of these untruths anyways. Each page was A2 in width, and it has since been up at the ArtScience museum, as well as the library@Orchard for the whole of October 2016.
I think my fascination for small things comes from my name. My mum gave me the name. When I was a kid, someone told me: "Your name means really small". So I went home and asked my mum: "Why did you give me this kind of name?" And she said: "If you have big troubles, you kind of make it small. At the same time, things go through you and you make it big. You’re an agent of change."
Whenever there’s an issue, I would take a step back and this is how I deal with it. You become bigger than your problem, or you make them smaller than you, so that you could overcome it.
