Despite the opening up of borders, the flow of goods, people and ideas that globalisation facilitates and depends on, the borders are continually and extensively patrolled.

The artwork forms an approach or response to the issues of globalisation (the local and the global). Created within the context of Britain and the current concerns with immigration and the growing number of asylum seekers and refugees within Britain, the work reflects a pervading anxiety with ‘difference’. Despite the opening up of borders, the flow of goods, people and ideas that globalisation facilitates and depends on, the work chooses to explore the continual and extensive patrolling of borders with a focus on the more personal. Vent & Mimesis involves the artist and her ‘dummy’ rehearsing, reciting, and reconstructing a “pledge”. Terminology such as loyalty, obligation, allegiance that form the backbone of the pledge are exposed as culturally contingent terms. In 2001, the Home Office in the UK had under discussion the incorporation of a pledge for all new comers to the UK who sought permanent residence. The making of the work is not only a process of enactment but of re-enactment. A re-enactment of a site of power, ambiguity, control. The understanding of the spoken word in the work becomes contingent on an extra desire and patience to understand. Spoken backwards and then

edited forwards, the texts slip between something audible and acceptable to something completely alien. Ventriloquism as stated in the dictionary is the act of making a voice sound as if it came from some other source - or ‘elsewhere’. In contrast, The Collection of International Cultural Cross Dressing is a much more immediate work requiring less effort to ‘read’. This however is deceptive as the photographs donated by people from around the world show a strange collection of photographs of people dressed in clothes that they would themselves describe as ‘other’. The contexts range from situations of necessity to those reflective more of desires, play, fantasy. The viewer to make sense of the collection is placed in the position of reading information into the images. As an artist from Singapore, now currently based in the UK, these works are reflective not only of an engagement with the politics and problematics associated with globalisation, but also reflective of more personal experiences of migration, cultural difference, and dislocation.