The sketches of clouds executed by Tia Thuy Nguyen support the artist’s painterly exploration of liminal space, but also allow her to draw inspiration from the infinite and multifarious realm of the sky.
A keen eye and confident hand enable Nguyen to range from deliberate, delicate line drawings, to looser more care-free sketches and rhythmic circular patterns that evoke the amorphous and whimsical nature of drifting clouds. Deceptively simple, Nguyen’s is an often child-like vision of nature as something benign. This particular series of drawings is a homage to the serenity and solace human beings can find in nature, and particularly in looking up at the sky. The works are evinced by a delicate, ethereal quality, and there is also a shamanic, other worldly aspect to the artist’s practice that comes through particularly strongly in Nguyen’s drawings.
Nguyen’s approach to art-making could be understood at times as a visual equivalent to ‘stream of consciousness’ writing. It allows the author - or in this case, the artist, to move freely across time, from the first person to the third, from the real to the imagined or internalised.
Like her paintings of clouds, Nguyen’s drawings are a poignant reminder that human kind is nothing if not small in comparison to nature’s majesty. The sketches serve as a metaphor for the fragility of the human condition - and the recollection that our time under the sky is transient.
