Dismantled Bed II, Iteration II
Above and the following: Installation views of Dismantled Bed II, Iteration II, 2024, RMIT School of Art, Melbourne. Bedframe wrapped in acrylic wool, stainless steel wire rope. Dimensions variable.
At age three, before bedtime, my mother is reading me Sleeping Beauty. One of the illustrations shows the heroine spending her first night in the beast’s castle, tucked under thick lavender sheets in a large canopy bed. I point to the page and say, “I want that bed.”
At age 14 in high school, in art class, I get my assignment back—a figure drawing in ink. Returning my sketchbook, my teacher says, “You should draw more people who look like you.” Up until then, I was always drawing blonde, white girls. I thought they were ideal beauties.
At age 26, somehow in Australia, I look at my latest sketch of a European-style bed frame. I ask myself, Why do I keep dreaming of the West?
Dismantled Bed II (2024) disassembles the object of the bed frame and renders the wooden slats of the base as steps to form a floating stairway between the head and the foot. To dismantle is to pick apart, as I ponder on colonial mentality and decolonisation.
This is the third bed I wrapped since creating my methodology, and here I started to question my selection process for bed frames. In choosing the “right” bed, I first consider how “wrappable” it could be, but I also intuitively go for something nostalgic, one that would remind me of Western-style bedrooms for girls, something I wanted as a child. With media and literature so Americanised in the Philippines, how could I not form aesthetic ideals that yielded to Western standards?
When I finally received my own room as a teenager, I was given free rein to decorate. I chose pastel purple walls and had a cannonball bed frame custom-made. I didn’t know what I was doing; I had googled a photo of the design and showed it to the furniture maker. I later learned as an adult that this type of bed is sometimes referred to as “colonial style,” originating from 18th century British Colonial America and later becoming popular in the Federalist era.
For this piece, I selected a white, wrought iron bed frame, paired with a bright, harsh pink yarn to suggest femininity. The style of the frame seemed fairly common, and from group critique, I was informed by Australian peers that this style was a usual sight at old furniture shops and dumpsters. It feels fitting that a so-called Melbourne bed would now depict my misinformed desires of becoming part of Western society. I am questioning this desire, and to have the bed veer away from its solid, intact shape is to represent my growing disillusionment. The stairs suggest ascension, a metaphor for upward mobility, but also futility as the stairs are barred and lead to nowhere.
How then to move forward? In Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s essay Cultural Identity and Diaspora, he quotes political philosopher Frantz Fanon on the rediscovery of identity in the post-colonial. Fanon calls it a
“passionate research… directed by the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others.”
Decolonisation is an ongoing search, and I intend to pursue self-discovery through art. I keep wrapping because I have yet to reach my goal. Like American artist Agnes Martin, whose pursuit of beauty through painting lasted until her passing, I want to find beauty I can call my own. Martin had a mathematically complex process to create her grid paintings, and she was a ruthless editor who obsessed over each brushstroke and graphite mark. Similarly, my approach to wrapping requires focus and discipline. Every single line of thread I adhere onto the object’s surface is with intention, care and deliberateness. Striving for perfection through countless gestures and contortions of the body, there is much consternation in the process to achieve seamless results. But it is like a salve that soothes when I finally experience the piece afloat; bathed in soft light and enveloped by a humming noise that’s barely there. I chase after this high, and I intend to lean into this repetition until I feel satisfied.
Below: Work in progress images of Dismantled Bed II, 2024, RMIT School of Art, Melbourne.
