In her body of work thus far, Yasmin Sison has been a consistent advocate of playfulness. Liberating and fun, “it gives room for curiosity and unexpectedness,” the artist would share.

As play and art straddle the line between order and anarchy, plants come to the fore. The artist sees them as a balm of sorts, evoking a duality between interiority and a search for connections. Using assemblages of furniture—stacked, covered, wrapped, or tied—they are solidified as a unit. The process is meditative as it is therapeutic.

In this exhibition, there is another layer involved: a veiled sense of dread. In a seemingly downward spiral of the world, politics, the pandemic (is it even over?), and climate change among others, feed into an anxiety which in turn seeps into art and into daily life. “My works always straddle the line between order and chaos, and the continual flux in between,” Sison remarks, and in these she highlights home as both refuge and prison.

Being a de facto continuation of her exhibition, Box Forts for Big Children, where she explored themes and expressions of wonder, she turns to what could be, where the current state of the world will lead human existence to years down the line. The latter exhibition revisits the past, while this one looks to the future. A series of paintings, a few dozen sculptures, and photographs of collaged objects build a landscape that only exists through the immortality that artistic labour creates.

The appearances are often wild, with plants springing out of random locations in the made-up space. A minimal level of chaos among disheveled furniture makes it seem like a previously occupied space. These are still lifes pretending to be interiors, as she described the work in the previous exhibition. One can imagine different stages of life through the paintings: Bleeding Heart and Wild Bitter Melons set amidst a baby’s room, with a tree springing forth from the crib; careless days of youth is set in Fire Spike, with bright red buds set with shrubbery all around; both the bed and the ground is covered with blooms in Blushing Bride, and Hanging to Dry comes full circle with the inclusion of a crib within a bedroom with domestic objects like an iron and a sewing machine, signs of an early family, as flowers dangle from a clothes line across the ceiling. Circumnavigating her personal history as an artist is an inclusion of a painting from the early aughts.

Her objects and photographs provide a glimpse into transient states of existence. While some arrangements seem precarious, that is but the prevalent state of life. Anxiety in a way allows us to explore unreasonable options, and most of the time it leads us to great solutions.

In truth, the larger than life imagery in the paintings are but miniatures, small compartments that are akin to seeds for a playground. Quickly going about the tiny space imparts a certain sadness and sense of loss, but it also contains moments of grace for those who allow themselves to play with it.