Clement Space in the City, revised 2018, is installed at the Yale-NUS College Library, ground floor, from 4 April to 16 April 2018.
“Clement Space in the City is a series of private artistic interventions in anxiety-inducing public spaces. Our bodies come into contact with multi-sensory stimuli every day, and such over-activity can make the cityscape overwhelming. Artist Dawn-joy Leong asks herself, “How would an autistic person with acute and atypical senses devise interventions to mitigate and navigate sensory bombardment when traversing public spaces?” Tulle, organza and cotton create respites – personal oases of comfort and control among chaos. By installing visual and tactile spatial arrangements in the Yale-NUS College library, Leong invites members of the college community to rediscover their own sensory and material environments and to develop active, individualised coping strategies for wellbeing in a hectic world. This mode of artistic intervention is informed by the notion of neurodiversity – the concept that neurological differences are to be recognised and respected as any other human variation. In an ideal world, there would be no dichotomy between normal and abnormal – accessibility would be the status quo, not a luxury. Until then, Leong carves out these pockets from the multi-sensory fabric of her daily life, inspired by her assistive greyhound Lucy Like-a-Cahrm’s innate ability to do the same wherever she travels. Neurological accessibility in our age is not a luxury or a circumstance, but is possible through active, creative encounters with and reconciliations of difference.
You can touch, play, lie down, and even take a nap with these artworks.“
Text by Courtney Lynne Carter, Dean’s Fellow, Yale-NUS College, Singapore.
Dawn-joy Leong 