Nam, Paris, from the series Street Flower (2015): ACNI Permanent Collection (IRN. 2501)

Technique: Photographic print
Medium: Archival Ink Jet Print
Dimensions: 40 x 30 inches
Credit Line: ACNI Permanent Collection
Item Number: IRN.2501

As an artefact, Nam, Paris (from the Street Flower series) was included as part of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s permanent collection, featuring as the Arts Council’s Artist of The Month in June 2018 and exhibited in 2019 as an example of the ‘best female contemporary artists from Northern Ireland, to mark International Women’s Day’. This particular piece from the series was framed using the pattern contained within the image itself. The entire frame, front and back, was wrapped in the print from the jacket and backdrop contained in the image.

The work ‘Street Flower’, created as part of a Residency Award at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, depicts a young generation of Vietnamese women living in Paris now, as well as the daughters of women who travelled by boat to Europe in the 1970’s. Here they wear jackets within Parisian landscapes that they previously wore moving through the streets of Vietnam by moped. In Vietnam the jackets are worn to protect the skin from the sun. The jackets are multi-coloured, with floral patterns. They are not traditional, nor do they reference the past. Rather, they are a part of contemporary culture, referencing a momentum that is forward facing. Moving en masse through the streets of Hanoi and Saigon, women wearing these jackets, appear like a moving garden. Photography enables us to recreate one world within another. It has the ability to transport like a magic carpet or the white horse from the tale of Tir na NOg (Land of the Young). Within these images colour and dress become a language, and the photographs a kind of fabric, which transform and re-imagine complex personal identities, connecting people and place across time and space. Specifically, the displacement of the Vietnamese jackets re-locates aspects of Vietnamese sun, style and subtlety of substance, within a Parisian landscape.