DAWN NG'S ICE PERIOD

By documenting the melting of ice to explore memory, death and the transience of time, the multi-disciplinary visual artist has hit a thematic lodestone.

- JENNIFER CHEN

Dawn Ng is dressed in her customary white garb, which today comprises a pristine tank top and cotton pants smudged with the faint remnants of her art-making. The pastel stains are evidence of an earlier chaos that no one looking at her superbly neat studio could have surmised.

In this spacious room bathed in natural light, everything is in its place. Open shelves display books and rocks that she has collected for research and inspiration. Her colour references are organised on boards and all around are her latest body of work.

Her clothing is her visual break, says Dawn. "It's a gasp reflex to the ceaseless consumption and consideration of colours in and out of this studio."

For the past six years, the artist who burst onto the Singapore art scene with her 2010 guerrilla installations of outsized rabbits Walter has been exploring the themes of time, transience, memory and death by freezing colour pigments in ice - the most ephemeral material she could find in tropical Singapore - and documenting its disintegration and post-melt residue.

The project involves countless hours of research and experimentation with freezing processes, colour compositions, material reactions and interactions. (She uses inks, acrylics, dyes and watercolours.) The results, from photos of jewel-toned blocks of ice to rug-sized canvases of colour swirls, are as stunning as they are contemplative. They make up her Into Air body of work that includes photographs, lightboxes, videos and residue paintings.

The calm that her art evokes hides the tumult in their production, much like how Dawn's ethereal appearance covers the "tsunami" of feeling inside her.

She says that although in photographs, the blocks of pigment appear still and serene, like gemstones or rock formations, while the paintings look like topographies and maps, the process of making them involves urgency and violence.