fièvre des bois 

2025
 

Supported by a trellis modelled on the backyard trellis in the artists’ parent's backyard in Australia, fièvre des bois (2025) houses glass vegetables wrapped in cotton weavings encrusted with salt. Distilled rice wine infused with colonial imagery of Cambodia from the 1850's-1950's is trickled down threads onto etching plates down below. The idea of essence is encapsulated through the distilling of rice wine - a process done in the Cambodian countryside to make alcoholic beverages. To distill something is to extract the essence of it, retaining its most crucial moments and discarding the inconsequential. This, in tandem with imagery of Cambodia taken by explorers from the West extracting imagery of “Cambodian-ness” to disseminate back to the West, complicates the narrative around the artists’ personal understanding of her culture and how it is inherited.