The Straits Times | Arts picks: Exhibitions by three women artists spotlight the environment, the female gaze and mental

Arthur Sim, The Straits Times, November 10, 2022

Artist Geraldine Lim is a fan of the 16th-century Ripley Scroll, an alchemical manuscript which explains how to create the fabled Philosopher’s Stone.

 

In a statement, she says: “I was first inspired by the Ripley Scroll, intrigued by the iconography and symbols used. I felt certain objects in my drawings also symbolise secret feelings and thoughts that I have but that I fail to be able to convey fully in words, so they’re like a parallel universe to my existence.”

 

In her solo exhibition at Yeo Workshop called Tales Of The Metamorphosis Of The Unnamed, this parallel universe is inhabited by non-human and imagined life forms that have both childlike innocence and a peculiar sense of foreboding.

 

Lim works primarily with video and soft sculpture, as well as drawing and painting. While narrative-driven, her works form a discontinuous chain of enigmatic tales that perhaps also redefine the meaning of happy endings.