Nature's role in Asian culture

ARTIST Lucy Davis's ongoing project on wood has taken on several layers of meaning, from collecting discarded wooden objects in Little India to gathering stories about deforestation in the south Sulawesi island of Muna. The multifaceted exploration into where and how wood comes to us in its final form will be presented in a collaborative art installation - covering details as intimate as the thumbprint of a furniture restorer in Singapore to the bigger picture of deforestation in a remote Indonesian island.

It all started some five to six years ago when Davis was living in Little India, and found that "recyclers" weren't picking up the timber and wooden objects that get thrown out. They preferred metal or plastic objects, leaving everything else by the road side. "So when I started collecting them, it's not like I was depriving a karung guni man of his livelihood," she hastens to explain.

She picked up mostly domestic objects made of wood, made prints of them and these were first featured in an exhibition in 2009 at the former Post Museum on Rowell Road. In 2010, she formed a loose "umbrella" project called Migrant Ecologies, which included other collaborators' art practice-led inquiries into culture and nature. They've had several exhibitions of their works in Singapore and Edinburgh.