Whenever I flip a garment inside out, to look at the make of its seams and construction inside, I see a history.
If you've followed my art through the years, you'd know my experiment with clothing as almost an enduring format of performance art. Using meaning and materiality to challenge the world's need for definitions. Playing with ideas of optics and the body as a canvas for experiencing the lines between expectations, concealment, and exposure, making aware the politics of dress.
Human is an outfit, a curation of clothing, as textile, fabric, and threads that can be turned inside out and deconstructed in its individual make. My label, seams, size, patterns, threads, and origins draw parallels between choices and the realities, within gender, identity, health and socio-cultural politics.
You might just get an unraveling of your entire being and environment by bringing your outfit to therapy --If you're not articulate to verbally express yourself then art sets the perfect nonverbal way to exist as is.
-- then compound this by experiencing the current system under capitalism.
An outfit - the style in more than one way speaks, in navigating the complexities of ourselves and the world. Functioning as a barrier between the self and the outside world, with the ability to offer notions of both physical and psychological protection.
At this current time, I've collected 200++ thrifted or gifted bucket hats, and thrifted 200+ makeshift Fabrics and Shawls.
Understanding Fashion & Trauma:
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Growing up, I experienced time in fashion differently, it was in my mother's sewing machine, nothing like the time or format in ticking clocks, entirely independent and rebellious of it, each stitch had space - full and sentimental, and every part of the process was sewn in respect of her being and capacity. The make was slow, but a sustainable practice and process before I ever knew of the term.
I'd follow her in sourcing from the small haberdasheries shop in the town of Bagan Lalang, in Sg.Pelek, watch her converse with the always so kookily dressed aunties. My father, a third generation Pakistani in Malaysia played his part in bringing home gorgeous textile fabrics and pieces from his work trips as a flight steward, making friends with textile makers and shopkeepers for the best discounts, with the occasional bootleg trickled down styles of the high street - designer pieces from Beijing China that look all too real. A whole family that thrifts that can't part with things we find.
Growing up I realized that our relationship and the way we relate to fashion varies, time or labor itself in experiencing a connection, of value, in fashion can be different depending on your awareness or class-- if you are present in the process, the make of it, the people, vs. the production of it on an industrial level such as fast fashion.
like the industry itself,
It can make us all feel very much disposable, as human commodity or as garments.
I have sat in contrast to how the body stands in parallels to experiencing the issues prevalent and intrinsic in fashion's speak of capitalism -
'Fashion suggests that it holds your 'identity' while implying subtly or not, that the identity you have is somehow inadequate.'
"Why are seams and labels of our garments placed on the inside? Why do we wear these traces of construction on our skin? Why do our clothes tend to be softer on the outside?"
- What Fashion Is Not (Only) by Dr Renate Stauss, Vestoj - The Journal of Sartorial Matters, Issue No 9, On Capital.
In every fashion course's demanding syllabus, you learn the fundamentals and in the process of sewing -- it begins from the inside out: the messier bits of its construction and traces are hidden inside for our acutely visual and vision-centered culture.
This journal write-up is observing and breaking down my relationship of self, identity, faith, in art and fashion sewn in ways of experiencing time, memory, loss, trauma and formulating self-perception. Motivated by learning of my condition - CPTSD, Complex Post Trauma Stress Disorder in a recent session with my clinical psychologist, stemming from loss, childhood neglect, sexual harassment and other things that compounded my trauma during my formative years.
Calling into understanding my more personal relation, to how I or we who especially find living enjoyment in the world of art, fabric, dressing in clothing as an identified form of liberation, expression or empowerment.
"The practice and poetics of consumption as a creative act, and consumers not as passive receptacles, but rather active agents with the ability to adapt the system imposed on them in a myriad of small, personal, and intuitive ways in order to navigate and enjoy life."
-Vestoj Magazine Issue 11: On Everyday Life
I decided last year to take my well-being seriously as I’ve begun to see its potential long-standing effects in my personal life and the struggle masking through life has started to wear me down greatly.
I started therapy from frequently hearing how I come off ‘peculiar’ from my alienation and having parented myself, some suspected autism — but It didn’t fit.
Struggling with tasks or nuances that others find easy, but do well in other parts that others find hard. My guardedness or closed off-ness robs myself of the experience of joy in safety or security, that only select people in certain spaces ( more personally ) would see or experience. Others would call me ‘otherworldly’ or more extremely a ‘case study’.
The manic pixie girl syndrome, but without the manic, just pixie syndrome. -- Thats me.
Although it seems like I'm an overachiever, it stems from navigating and masking complex situations, skimming over my struggle with simpler cognitive tasks which caused my other feats to become unseen.
Documenting my work
NIYAT
There are two niya's here.
Pictures shot at @HighkeyflairStudio
In Dubai, in a poetry book I picked up I found a poetry piece in my childhood name (only used by people dearest to me) in arabic meaning ‘intention’. It struck that being called out by someone dear to me, ‘Niya’, is a literal calling out for ‘intentions’ to come.
Niyat is a project I started last year - a way of investigating this very nature of the formation of self and intention through art, fashion and faith. Personally, it helped in my understanding the emergence of mine. My art, fashion and I do not come with any degree of separation, a practice that acts as self-surgery, that in turns speaks about my environment and its politics.
Although my grief filled coma was rooted in loss of a parental figure, it also took shape in a multitude of ways in my experience as a girl growing up that speaks to other women.
The Muslim women experience (which is by no means a homogenous one), the skin and fabric being in accompaniment to one another, in the concept of especially modest fashion -- layering fabrics and pieces can be a form of art, an endless playground to limitless collage a sense of self, reality and negotiation in belief. In this I did, I revel in layers and layers of thrifted skin.
It can feel like a tremendous pressure to be pushed into things we aren't fully aware of so young, of the changes, treatments or perceptions in relation to what the power a fabric holds in its weight in the world, what it entails for our being and community - in understanding underlying motivations and choices. It can become repressed as a grievance when we find ourselves stuck to adhering conventions or expectations as a transaction for acceptance or safety within family or society.
In Niyat's solo exhibition at the National Art Gallery, I was ‘space’, a big unknown that hadn’t presented or introduced itself to any formations of self, that in every person young women meet, they end functioning in reflection or affiliation to them, their intentions, wants, agendas instead of the space to take shape. In essence, it is neglect that makes the absence of owning a sense of self continued, tied to the whims of others.
Made easy for intruders to make use of a home that has taught a sense of powerlessness, in the visually forward tenant that every young woman poses to be.
"Fashion including the hijab as a means of constructing identity and expressing self."
"Beauty for the Muslim woman is an overarching concept where fashion plays a dominant role because bodies have to be covered, and the outward display of beauty is often demonstrated through fashion."
-Malay Muslim Religious Ideology: Representations of Gendered Beauty Ideals in Women’s Magazines Juliana French, Christina Kwai Choi Lee, and Jan Brace-Govan
In the make of Niyat,
Each stitch is space, and time.
The repetitive rhythms of the sewing machine stitching, the tattoo gun inking, the jump rope circling -- all in conviction and in accompaniment of the heartbeat.
Fabric is skin.
Fashion in its transformational value - an ephemeral visual language, a form of activism, a manner of identification or solidarity in belonging with alternative ideals, a tool to redeeming control in identity, autonomy, and visibility in beliefs and self. Fashion presents itself as a process, a wear aware of its creative labor on our bodies.
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An Outfit's Patterns & Seams
Around 14, I had to relocate to a suburb near a city. I was that strange off-placed kid in a long religious garb sticking out in an open city environment, which I never knew was a very conservative choice outside of the countryside which I grew up in. Outside of adjusting, I noticed things at home becoming off-putting. My mother gradually got sick and was nursed at home. My dad worked and cared for her in intervals when he wasn't flying as an in-flight supervisor with my brother who took care of her out of college during these months, and often we’d hear her painful prolonged grunts throughout the night. My family has a distrust or even morbid fear of modern medicine and hospitals, we relied on homeopathy and religious treatments during this time — ayurvedic medicines or herbs and plants, acai berries, Morinaga leaves, apple cider, pecah beling, the importance of beetroot juice etc, My first panadol - paracetamol gave me a high fever for a week because it wasn't what my body was accustomed to.
My mother kept her illness a secret for years until stage four breast cancer, not knowing it was terminal until the very last moment of her being rushed by an ambulance to the hospital. I was at a friend’s house having run off to escape the daily dread of it. She refused treatments such as chemo or a Mastectomy which as a family we respected. My last visit was a 3am trip to the ICU before her passing. I chose to withdraw myself from seeing her for the last time and was told I’d regret it for life.
I struggled in my younger years, feeling terrible for wishing in my loud silence — her death, for her suffering to end which would end mine. Being present to witness her slow physical changes at home every day came with a painful acquired grace. In the rawness of life, I sat down with the silence of it happening daily even before I understood what it was.
I wanted her departure quicker so she may finally rest. It took several years to learn it wasn't inhuman to hold such sentiments, it is just human.
Sometimes at 15, you can’t be.
My mother was the type of woman in life to shoulder whether it be pain or responsibilities all to herself like a martyr. Health always felt like it was buried in shame or guilt (not uncommon for women). Through the years I found myself stringing together all the things that were amiss, how the pungent smell when we cuddled was her breast putrefying under a styrofoam fashioned bra she made, laced over a strong scent of sea cucumber ointment - as if earth had arisen from the ocean.
She lost her mother similarly at my age to terminal illness, and was tasked to care for the remaining siblings during when my grandfather worked as a cab driver in Penang. I learned of the history of family illness in women overtime and of my schizophrenic aunt nursed for decades at the flat -- who my mother cared for deeply.
I navigated grieving in a confusing time where puberty settled in, made a very strange combination of a fullness of life muted and silenced with loss, more than not being able to relate to teens bursting with life at my age, you’d find adults are more confused and troubled with what to do with you -- they’d rather sit out from it entirely. I disconnected from my environment; my teen years were foggy. Grief inhabited who I am during those pivotal formative years, becoming central in the way I function in life. I kept myself entertained with an imaginary world of make believe to find solace and parentified myself. My father fell into depression, shutting down emotionally. The nature of his work meant he’d be away for days or weeks, at times out of need he’d bring me along on duty, but he wasn’t all there as a person. I learned much later about the family’s life savings being depleted in treatments to keep my mother alive.
Left to my own devices alone at home where it all happened, I was immensely confused on how to navigate the early onset of womanhood — how to care for myself, lack of proper meals (or were there any meals on some days), lack of hygiene from neglecting my well-being and needs didn't aid my weaker immune system that I am still dealing with. I spent my school days playing truant at Sunway Pyramid Ice where I met equally troubled teens. My father remarried in my teens without my full knowledge or awareness of what changes it would occur. It caused a great deal of confusion and pain, not long after my sister followed suit. There was an immense feeling of betrayal during these occasions, I felt invisible and left behind to deal with multiple layers of loss - of the mother, the father, the sister and the brother.
How does a 16 year old find the tools to make sense of such events? of terminal Illness, depression, puberty, death, loss, womanhood, neglect, etc.
As the youngest, I couldn’t escape.
Running away frequently provided me spots of solace in different households, borrowing safety, for even just a moment in time, I could play family. -- I am thankfully for pockets of soft parenting from the families and women who for a brief period, lent me a safe space.
Learning the lived experiences shared by women of all ages -- I found a violence normalized, causing the need to formulate ways of coping that are maladaptive but works on a surface level, leading to a sense of powerlessness and the dismissal of its lasting impact on our well-being.
I'm not foreign to navigating through attempts of assault, stalking, flashing, manipulation or threats -- There were moments that I brought a hammer around in my bag as a teen due to hypervigilance. Call it overblown, but it is the ordinary experience of a young woman doing life.
ain't it fun? -- Hayley williams.
Today, in differing occasions or get-togethers that are as beautiful and joyous, in many ways to others are potential triggers that people around may not see or even begin to comprehend.
Art and fashion became my reason for living, my parents, format of education, learning religion, armor and persona. I found a resilient community of kindhearted misfits and dreamers. Emboldening Dhani, my Cerberus to guard my frightened well-being and a pillar in navigating the world. Volunteering in ice hockey opened a chance to afford discounted training and I got scouted to join the girls' team which opened myself to a community of girls who taught me the simpler joys of girlhood that I had missed out, who helped me acquire gear too.
Some of the random commissions I did during high school and in my early 20's for room walls
or live events of random clients.
I received an intervention from my aunt who bathed me to show how grooming works and replenished my essentials for hygiene such as undergarments, addressing bits of my self-esteem and health, and my brother-in-law who knocked some sense in the family to think about my prospects in getting me an education to acquiring a diploma.
There were many different shapes love can exist to sustain us differently than what we come to know or perceive conventionally.
My family became better equipped in a quality of life by the presence of the two earnest individuals in our lives who were married into. I, too, started to reap some benefits of my hard work from sustaining my passionate endeavors.
I am openly vulnerable in my art, which can seem off-putting to some, if not strange in certain settings since my art practice can be raw in its sentiments and challenges (if not contrasting) ideas of what is professionally fitting —- whether in work or personal life - its an enveloping totality. Somehow there's a pervasive idea to contain 'humanness' in exhibited art, that it would reflect less value in intellectual or professional integrity (whatever that means). There's also the game you play with the media and its cherry-picking of you into glamorous consumable packages -- these are some of the more unknown side or reality for artists to survive.
My mother’s name, Hanitah, translates to ‘heavenly grace in ashes.’ And true to her name, she departed —with grace amidst the ashes.
Sometimes at 15, you can't be
Sometimes at 27, you find yourself at 15
Sometimes at 28, you find
- Niya
And a very happy 28th birthday to her!
all my love.
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