Audio Transcript
My name is, in English, it’s Pamela See. I’m a visual artist who works in contemporary paper cutting. So that involves just removing negative space to create a positive image. The style that I use, it quite closely resembles Foshan Paper Cutting which is endemic to Guangdong Province where my mother’s family come from in China. There’s a number of artworks which I was really fortunate to have collected from a body that I developed in response to COVID-19. I was in China when it actually started. So it was something that already had an impact on me despite I think for most Australians it seeming an entire world away and I don’t think any of us could have imagined what it would become.
COVID-19 was such a disruption to everyone’s lives. In that sense that became the main stressor for, for many of us. And prior to this time a lot of my work had to do with migration, but that basically ceased in 2020. And I think in this sense that the work is a little bit different. For instance there is an artwork which is in the collection now called You have two cows. And so this relates to the political, the joke it’s a satire, about different political systems. You have two cows, and for instance if it were communism then they would take the two cows and give you milk in return. So this artwork depicts two cows but it also has one of the cows being painted. And why I did that was because the Australian Government had just started giving out money to support people in lockdown, it was never going to be a permanent initiative. So when it rains, the paint will wash off. In terms of being collected it’s a real privilege because it means that dialogue will continue I’m hoping after I die so that these discussions can continue to be had.
Each of us, we can’t really know what someone else is going to get out of our own personal testimonies or stories. I’m wanting to leave something behind, some clues, so that people in the future might have an understanding as to how we lived.