What drew me to Cat, Cally and Gen’s works was a shared tenderness towards mundane objects and everyday encounters. Their works often begin with things that might otherwise go unnoticed: a view from a window, a found tile, an object carried in a pocket. But more than that, all three artists seem to have intimate and sustained relationships with the things around them. The works in this exhibition are not entirely new works, instead they are new encounters with earlier works, materials and observations.

The title pbdq comes from the visual relationship between these four letters – through the simple acts of rotation and flipping, one letter becomes another. This sequence of forms is something that plagues me as someone with dyslexia, but it became interesting as I thought of the artists’ practice. A small shift in orientation produces a new form, yet traces of the original remain. Found objects are iterated and the same image is seen through different ways of looking.

Another early inspiration for the show was the children’s folk song 排排坐*. Its origins are unknown, and its lyrics shift across regions and generations. Like many children’s songs, it relies on repetition: a simple melody carried forward through continual rearrangement and variation. The lyrics reference sequencing and arrangement, while the song itself survives through cycles of repetition, reordering, and resampling. What persists is not the original form, but a pattern that continues to find new expression.

Conversations with the artists quickly meandered towards works they had made before that might be interesting to present in new forms or versions. Quite often, making in Singapore demands that artists produce new works and commissions with every invitation to exhibit. This time, instead, they return to ideas that have stayed with them, allowing something familiar to unfold in new directions.

Gen’s works in the exhibition stem from an earlier image series, An attempt at exhausting a place from my window (2020–21), where she produced twenty-six variations of a single view. Between what you see now and what we saw in the studio, the constellation of objects Gen has assembled are coordinates for abstracted forms that have escaped the picture plane to become a physical constellation. In her practice, words are often as malleable as objects. While discussing possible titles, I found that playing with language became a way for both of us to clarify the work’s process and internal logic, teasing out the rules by which forms might be rearranged, translated and held together. Found objects are arranged into landscapes that almost feel like diorama worlds. For Gen, this process also recalled the childhood game masak masak, where children play at cooking, improvising with found twigs and household objects as props. With An attempt at solidifying make-believe landscapes, we become both participants in and observers of these landscapes, constructing them through memory, attention and imagination.

Similarly, Cat’s works begin with acts of noticing and a sustained fascination with form. Years ago, she encountered a perfectly square object that fascinated her, and it was only much later that she realised it was a mosaic tile. By then she had come across a large abandoned pile of them, likely discarded during a renovation. The tiles had to be carefully washed and processed, excess concrete chipped away. Hearing her describe the troubleshooting and effort involved, it felt almost like a process of stripping away their functional past lives and reconfiguring them into individual units worth pausing over. The resultant work is titled Found Tile Stool, almost concealing the care taken to create it beneath its matter-of-fact name.

In a slightly different tenor, Cat’s other piece in the show, I think you dropped this, gathers the looped forms she collected since studying in Chicago: earrings, rings, bracelets. Both the title and familiar forms of the jewellery suggest a night out or dressing up. The form itself is quite uncanny, assembled into a chain that runs from floor to ceiling, it brought to mind 结绳记事, the ancient practice of tying knots to record and remember. Considered together, the two works feel like records of sustained, unhurried attention and curiosity.

Of the three, Cally’s work takes the most physical route: she has dismantled an earlier piece entirely and rebuilt it from its own parts. The work originates from an earlier piece composed of woven pockets arranged in a grid, each holding found objects gathered from the pockets of friends, sealed within delicate hand-woven structures made from a type of white silk yarn beautifully named Milky Way. This time round, the material has made its way into the title: Milky Way Finds. In rethinking her initial fascination with white fabric—its translucency and the way it turns sheer with water—Cally wanted to let the material shine and shed the performative activation of the previous iteration.

Breaking the large piece into individual pockets invited a different way of looking. It also produced greater variation in the weave itself: flatter pockets resulted in more consistent netting, while pockets holding three-dimensional objects caused certain sections to stretch and distort, widening the gaps between each strand and revealing more of what was held within. Looking at them now, the material existence of the pockets becomes the subject: what they hold, what they conceal, what they offer up for looking. The works also offer a glimpse into Cally’s recent thinking about craft materials and craft objects as subjects in their own right, rather than as means of imitating forms from everyday life.

Maybe these works propose a different kind of looking and learning—not one that only asks what artists are making next, but one that reveals what survives time and curiosity. Earlier works become fodder for new ones, and old encounters resurface in unexpected forms.

Take a look today, and look again tomorrow and the day after, and after, and after. I hope you pause to look somewhere you didn’t before.