Cambodia

Leang Seckon’s work is strongly autobiographical and Heavy Skirt is a theme that runs through his works, it refers to the heaviness of his mother’s quilted skirt that she wore while she was pregnant with him during the civil war of the early 1970s. The thick fabric can be read as a metaphor for the burden of survival in the face of relentless hunger and bombing from the beginning of hostilities between the Cambodian army and both North Vietnamese forces and Khmer Rouge guerrillas in the early 1970s. The country endured decades of misery until the overthrow of Pol Pot’s regime and eventual peace agreement in 1991.

To Leang Seckon, stitching is like breathing, and it is like meditation. We have an idea already for the work before we begin. In Leang Sechon’s words, “When we start to stitch, we don’t hurry to finish the entire work. As we push the needle in and draw it out, we breathe, and enjoy the breathing coming and going, enjoying each stitch. Of course the main point of the stitching is to make the artwork, but what are we thinking about, meditating on while we make stitches? Our stream of consciousness is ‘Oh, what are we doing tomorrow?’ We think a lot, and the spirit of our thinking joins with the work and the spirit around the work.”

I don’t have any experience of snow falling in my country. So, the Snowflower Skirt is not to be found in Cambodia at all, not anywhere. But I am imagining the work  Snowflower Skirt, this paradise skirt which brings enjoyment and pleasure. We have to do everything in our power to address climate change and avert a catastrophe. 

It is 1970 and the Mekong River is the border between the city controlled by Lon Nol and the life in the countryside, which is in the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Light at night time fills both city and countryside; bombs, parties, storms, war and weddings. People drink and celebrate at parties while elsewhere guns and metal light up the darkness.

Parachute lights fall slowly and silently at night, flooding the land with their gaze. Each one lights up a large space of land, together they reveal all, swallowing any safe passage to the bunker. Everybody knew the strange things falling from the sky were to do with the war. First come flares, parachute lights, then the bombs.

The detail of war is people killing each other while parachutes fall and fly. Found parachutes were recycled to be blankets or covers from rain and sun at weddings and other gatherings. Bombs, planes, chaos, death. Heavy Skirt leaves her shadow, but we choose to blossom; we choose peace, we choose to heal what is left with us from strong experiences we have survived.