Cassy Oliphant
Cassy Oliphant’s practice explores the intersection between Chinese and European myth, craft traditions and cultural identity. She works across painting, textile and photographic processes, using these techniques as material metaphors for creative exploration. Traditional stitching connects her to her Singaporean family heritage, while cyanotype’s interplay of light and shadow reflects the revealing and obscuring of family memory. Through these processes, Oliphant reimagines cultural memory as porous and alive, creating a dialogue between myth and material and between collective tradition and personal history.
Cassy Oliphant
Cassy Oliphant’s practice explores the intersection between Chinese and European myth, craft traditions and cultural identity. She works across painting, textile and photographic processes, using these techniques as material metaphors for creative exploration. Traditional stitching connects her to her Singaporean family heritage, while cyanotype’s interplay of light and shadow reflects the revealing and obscuring of family memory. Through these processes, Oliphant reimagines cultural memory as porous and alive, creating a dialogue between myth and material and between collective tradition and personal history.
Pintu Pagar - Thresholds
Cyanotype, Embroidery on Cotton and Silk
90 x 150 cm
Pintu Pagar – Thresholds brings together different generations of the women in Cassy Oliphant’s family, using traditional Singaporean Peranakan architecture as a means of exploring both family history and Singaporean cultural heritage.
The photographs depict members of her family: formal portraits taken outside family homes on one side and more intimate moments featuring her mother and great-grandmother, on the other. Through this work, Oliphant creates a sense of interior and exterior, reflecting her experience of growing up both within and between British and Singaporean cultures, with a foot in each world.
