Where Wings Remember presents a porcelain white kingfisher perched on one of nine walking sticks cast from an aid once used by the artist’s late mother. The work brings together bodily support, scientific preservation, and personal loss through a fragile constellation of forms. It examines how lives are sustained, classified, and remembered through systems of care and institutional management.
The kingfisher is sculpted without legs, recalling a line from Days of Being Wild about a bird that can never rest. In this work, however, the bird does not fly endlessly. It remains perched on a walking stick, dependent on an external structure for survival. Unable to stand on its own, it exists through continuous support, reflecting forms of life sustained by assistance, adaptation, and negotiation rather than by autonomy.
The sculpture is inspired by the story of a kingfisher captured in Chiang Saen in the 1970s and preserved as a scientific specimen. Removed from its environment and transformed into archival material, the bird became part of an institutional collection. In this work, history is translated into porcelain, shifting scientific preservation into a fragile, handcrafted form that questions how knowledge and memory are produced through classification and display.
The walking sticks, once tools of physical assistance, retain traces of the artist’s mother’s movement, dependence, and daily negotiation with illness. They function as quiet records of care, extending bodily support into sculptural form. What was once a practical object becomes a structure that continues to hold, long after its original use has ended.
By bringing together animal preservation and medical dependency, the work reflects on how different forms of disappearance are shaped through similar systems of management. Scientific archiving and healthcare administration both claim to protect life, yet they also regulate, measure, and limit it. Within these systems, vulnerability is stabilised through documentation, routines, and infrastructures that often remain invisible.
In this arrangement, the bird and the walking sticks form a suspended relationship. Neither is complete on its own. Their balance depends on mutual support and constant adjustment. This unstable configuration reflects how survival is distributed across bodies, objects, and institutions, rather than located within individual strength.
Where Wings Remember situates mourning within broader structures of care and maintenance. Memory is not preserved through monuments or heroic narratives, but through fragile materials, substitutions, and everyday practices of support. The work examines how tenderness and dependency persist under conditions of precarity, where survival relies on networks that are socially undervalued and politically overlooked.
Through restraint and material sensitivity, the installation frames remembrance as an active practice embedded in infrastructures of care. It proposes that presence continues not through permanence, but through relations that must be constantly sustained. In doing so, the work extends the artist’s ongoing inquiry into how lives are rendered visible, supported, and allowed to endure within contemporary systems of power.