Faultlines
2025
Oil on canvas, engraved stainless steel frame
110 x 99.5 x 6.5 cm

Faultlines probes the fractures that ripple through histories, collective memories, and materiality. Reflecting on the lingering presence of imperial legacies, at its centre hangs a chandelier from a house of King Rama V’s era, rendered in bruised, gilded strokes—a fragile echo of borrowed superfluity. Its light, once promising clarity, now casts shadows that reveal deeper fissures: the cost of adopting foreign ideals at the expense of indigenous ways of being. Found within a museum in the national park (Villa Musée Khao Yai), houses from different eras have been disassembled from their original sites, relocated, and renovated to preserve interiors now laden with colonial signifiers embedded in the very infrastructure of the country’s histories.

Encasing the painting is an unyielding frame forged from metal, its rigid structure mimicking the sinuous plasticity of betel plant leaves. Once dense carriers of ritual and kinship, these leaves have been stripped of their essence, recast as cold imitations of themselves—yet monumentalised as acts of reclaiming and recontextualising. Living practices are often hardened into relics, lost in translation across generations and within a world that is rapidly shifting. The beginning of this research into postcolonial theory, encrypted pasts, and colonial legacies was informed by personal and collective memory rooted in the artist’s family history surrounding the betel nut. It now serves as the fundamental pillar upholding all that the artist creates—a nod and ode to what has drastically impacted her life. The title Faultlines speaks to these hidden ruptures—geographical and cultural. Like tectonic plates grinding beneath the surface, the interplay of chandelier and frame embodies the instability of collective memory and historiographies.