Photos courtesy of Critical Craft Collective
WHILE HOME REPRESENTS safety and comfort, it also acts as an intimate space shaped by unseen systems of discipline and boundaries. In it, each person is assigned unseen roles within a larger social order. Can home be liberating, or is it about learning the contours of one’s place?
Singapore-based artist and educator Adeline Kueh mulls on the idea surrounding this sense and structure of home, as shaped by inherited roles embedded within our psyche.
“Home is not just physical, but also psychical,” suggests Adeline, who, alongside fellow artist and co-curator Hazel Lim, co-founded the Critical Craft Collective (CCC), a curatorial platform that uses craft to explore dynamics of power, care and kinship.
Their latest exhibition, From Palais to Pulau, challenges conventional notions of domesticity and belonging. Its first edition was recently shown during the 2025 Singapore Art Week, and is being restaged in Penang this June. An ode to dislocation and deep care, the exhibition acts as a gathering that reflects different ways of belonging through everyday materials, found objects and slow conversations that often begin around a kitchen table.
“[The exhibition includes] all items of care. And when [we] give attention to these things, there are values that are imbued in [them] below the surface,” says Adeline. “These elements of beauty can be ways of imagining the future, of hope, of resilience.”
