Stay Home Quilt (SHQ) was originally a project started by Singaporean artist Jimmy Ong (b. 1964) as Poverty Quilt in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 2019. It involves working with a group of nyai penjahit (“artist-seamstresses” in Javanese) to prepare large quilts for buttons to be sewn on in an exhibition to memorialise his late grandmother. Under the invitation of 3P Community Arts Lab as an artist-in-residence in Tzu Chi Humanistic Youth Centre in Singapore, the artist had reconceived the project as SHQ, to explore pertinent issues surrounding the city-state’s ambiguous relations with migrant workers at the time during the early Covid-19 pandemic situation.
As part of the residency, Ong and his assistants have sent out sewing kits to residents for their participation at home and they had also coordinated sewing workshops for migrant workers in temporary dormitories where these workers were held during the lockdown to begin with. In between time, Ong had also conducted a series of Tikar weaving workshops for the public, whose small weaving panels were later used to construct a larger floor mat to be placed in the “Joglo” style house made during the course of his residency.
In October 2020, art students were placed with members of Tzu Chi in a series of weekend open-houses to engage the community in view of migrant workers under quarantine. The film was documented from September through October at Tzu Chi in Singapore. Migrant workers were quarantined next door to the centre in Yishun Futsal Arena (enclosed football field) from May to July 2020. Jimmy Ong was artist in residence with 3P from March through November 2020.
Film excerpts: (L) The artist conducts a dyad and (R) discusses about nongkrong over meals with art-assistants, 2020-21
Special thanks: Jimmy Ong, 3P Community Arts Lab.
© 2022
