School of Creative
Industries
Kimberly Kiong
Kimberly is a Singaporean lens-based artist. She is intent on anchoring her introspections to her physical reality and explores various methods of mark-making to reify visceral encounters she experiences.
Common threads of her daily musings revolve around quotidian sights, transitional objects, intrapsychic and interpersonal experiences. These often convene and fuel her interest in the pathos of stories.
Work
Through a glass darkly
Mixed media
20.3 x 15.2 cm
2022
Through a glass darkly explores the embracing of emotional landscapes from the artist's own adolescence. These landscapes sprouted from emotions she intially felt compelled to hide away and keep to herself, but upon revisiting them, she can finally meet them with unflinching acceptance now. They belong to a time that felt like an endless fever dream, a labyrinth with no map, a journey she can only emerge from by simply experiencing it with a sliver of hope and look back on after, to find constellations amidst disjointed checkpoints.
Thesis abstract
Stimulating movement in art therapy: Exploring the role of interactive artworks in developing emotional resilience with a female adolescent within a residential setting in Singapore
This qualitative, practitioner-based thesis explores the role of interactive artworks in developing emotional resilience in a female adolescent in a residential setting in Singapore. As the research around therapeutic interventions for youths in residential settings in Singapore is still emerging, this thesis aims to illuminate a previously-unexplored angle in local literature. Currently, a trauma-informed framework has been gaining traction over the past few years in Singapore, when working with adolescents who have been assimilated into the state’s child welfare system. This thesis seeks to supplement the trauma-informed framework, with creative means of reorganising a traumatised adolescent’s internal working model of attachment, to develop emotional resilience. More specifically, this approach towards art therapy leans into using kinesthetic and sensory elements to stimulate movement when the therapist is faced with a freeze response from the client, as observed in a single case study with a female adolescent.