Anne Samat creates totemic sculptural pieces that from a distance emit a mythological monumentality. Standing close, however, one’s eyes struggle to settle on a single focal point, pulled in a thousand different directions by the intricacy of the individual elements, as though peering through a kaleidoscope. The artist’s conviction that the red thread running through existence is love is echoed in the way her works often emerge from personal stories or protagonists from Samat’s own life. Indebted to South East Asian songket or pua kumbu weaving traditions, the artist’s use of materials such as rattan sticks, washers, beads, plastic swords, kitchen utensils, and yarn interrupt the classic warp and weft. In her sculptures, there is often the eternal return of certain figural stances (a subject with arms extended, for example), allegorical and intimately subjective at once. From one angle, the viewer may intuit a narrative that combines personal history, the impact of migration, the culture of consumption, and the representation of gender; from another, one encounters an avatar fashioned of discount store goods miraculously imbued with unintelligible power, transformed by the hand of the artist into far more than the sum of its parts.

Work in the exhibition: Wide Awake And Unafraid #3 (2024), rattan sticks, kitchen and garden utensils, beads, ceramic, metal and plastic ornaments, handwoven tapestry, 670 × 365 cm. Courtesy of the artist