My childhood home was rarely lonely. Somewhere solid and safe, I would traverse in and out of the home with learned clarity. Coming home was coming back to the smell of freshly steamed rice, to the gentle scents of lit incense and cubed dragon fruit, to the sizzling noises of my grandmother’s wok. Leaving home was yearning to come back.
Referencing a saying in Lao, ມາເດີ້ໆ, which means, ‘Come, you’re welcome,’ or ‘Come eat, and be with us,’ there is a gentle invitation in Mechelle Bounpraseuth’s exhibition. Often used in the context of when it is understood that someone cannot make it, the saying is an invitation to be — to be with each other, to grieve in warmth and longing, to yearn for a place made whole again. The exhibition is filled with what the artist calls ‘objects of care’, which take the form of familiar Indomie Goreng flavour sachets and Nong Shim shrimp crackers, of heart-shaped quilted pillows, of Tiger Balm ointments and Eagle Brand Oil that can altogether cure arthritis, stomachaches, joint pains and migraines. An experience which many second-generation immigrants share, in growing up without access to many cultural traditions, Bounpraseuth turns to the presence of these minute objects in the home as reminders of love and care. Perhaps in a similar way through which ມາເດີ້ໆ expresses the desire to share in a grieved absence, Bounpraseuth’s objects form a system of value through which they enact a haptic remembering, where acts of care are coagulated into spoken words, into declared constancy.
Thus, laid bare in between the works is a quiet, consistent and attentive love. Bounpraseuth tells me, “When I look at my childhood, it is hardly through a lens of nostalgia. Instead, it is something I experience in the present, something tangible.” This tangibility is something representative in the textures of Bounpraseuth’s works. Earthenware itself is conjured upon the touch into magnified forms which consign themselves to a kind of ‘home’ that unquestionably exists, yet appears to hold weight in a kind of forever memory. In this way, scale and details are important to Bounpraseuth’s practice. To look at her works means to confront these objects with an enduring gentleness. She describes the repetitive labour of moulding, sculpting, firing, painting and glazing as an enactment and an act of honouring the labour her parents had instilled in her growing up. Pointing to the gold lustre details on the works, she talks about the memory of her mother’s way of addressing Bounpraseuth as their “ທອງຄຳ/thongkham,” their “gold nugget.” Gold is a sign of wealth in Lao culture, embodying safety, dreams and hope for many within complex histories of political and economic oppression. For Bounpraseuth, gold helped bought her parents’ passage — it lingers on Tiger electric cookers, on unpeeled rambutans and persimmons, on the warm memory of her mother’s voice, on the generational stuntedness of wanting to feel grief. Thus, behind the tangible forms of her objects, lies an uncoiling of invisible, yet understood labour – the labour of making, the labour of translating, the labour of learning to read between the gaps, the words, reading between languages and when words ultimately fail to convey, the humorously painful labour of reading love and care through overpriced jackfruits from Flemington Markets given to you as acknowledgments of mortality.
Listening to Bounpraseuth, my eyes tracing the sunlight around her studio on a late summer day as we shared some warm grilled eggplant, I remember the words of Gavin Yuan Gao,
The year I allowed myself
to miss you & only told the mulberry
as I stroked its dry bark. A loose wind
knuckled its mottled leaves
freckling my cheeks with the sun’s warm coins
as if it was the only one who’d grasped
what I didn’t say
couldn’t say (for loss was still the coppice
that lay beyond the border
of my young tongue) & grieved with me
Thu Tran, 2024
