JOLENE LIAM

Jolene Liam is a London-based multidisciplinary artist from Singapore. She believes that the spaces we inhabit and the objects we collect reveal a lot about us; expressions of our identities, habits, and personalities. Jolene’s background as an architect has fuelled an interest in observing and documenting how places are occupied and experienced. In the process, she hopes to encounter different ways of thinking about the spaces around us, from everyday and in-between spaces to imagined landscapes.

Working in the expanded, experimental field of drawing enables Jolene to find new ways of interrogating space. The ‘in-between’ and the ‘not quite’ are her tools of choice: drawing with string or painting on the back of canvases, creating works that sit on the boundaries between drawing and sculpture. Jolene is interested in how we construct artworks physically and conceptually; drawn towards things on the periphery of painting and considering the potential of everything to become art. She is fascinated by how objects, as mediums, can enhance the experience of painting and by how the choice to make or call something a painting is important in deciding where the line between art object and non-art object is.

Currently, Jolene is being mentored on the Off-Site Programme at Turps Art School and previously studied at the Essential School of Painting. Before this, she practiced as an architect for over seven years at Studio Egret West and Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. Jolene’s work has been shortlisted for several awards including the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, Derwent Art Prize, Art Gemini Prize, World Illustration Awards and the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Eye Line Drawing Competition.