Crowds of people ebb and flow through the visually-busy Esplanade Concourse every day. The staircase at its centre was originally designed as a means of access from the main entrance, but is now set aside for art, and cannot normally be entered. In line with her site-specific practice rooted in research about the design history of spaces, Kathryn Kng examined the architectural drawings of the site, and created giant floating walls of translucent plastics that outline potential paths along the stairs and ramps, with a door sliced downward through the walls serving as an actual and symbolic bridge between worlds. All these newly outlined thoroughfares become visual lines of flight for the viewer to imagine, and long for passage through the space.

This work responds to the role and context of the concourse steps. By juxtaposing an ethereal visualisation of its historical function in the present-day site, it subtly evokes the transformations the space continues to undergo. It suggests that buildings are not autonomous objects, but are instead assemblages that evolve according to institutional choices as well as the collective desires of the bodies that move through them.

Kathryn Kng (b. 1951) is a practicing interior designer since 1976, and a ceramic artist (training with Iskandar Jalil in the 1980s and recently at workshops in Japan and UK). She recently graduated from the Master of Arts Fine Arts Programme at Lasalle College of the Arts / Goldsmiths, University of London, where she received the Lasalle Award for Academic Excellence. She previously studied art and design at the High Wycombe College of Art and Technology and graduated with a BA from Kingston College of Art.

Artist Talk: 25 Feb 2017, Sat, 2 – 3pm
Meet at Esplanade Concourse

Venue: Esplanade Concourse

When: 13 Jan - 2 Apr 2017,

By: Esplanade