Year of Birth:
1964

Disability:
Severe Hearing Impairment

Consistent with Geok Hwa’s cool-headed, puritan outlook, Art creeps into her heart and life not by her enraptured senses but by measured metres in her tendered understanding of its form. A Sister nun in the Canossian School for the Hearing Impaired and later, a Ceramics lecturer at LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts had initiated her into this mysterious world where mortal beings have a taste of birthing pains. However it was not only until she met Ceramics artist Mary Roger in a book that her fondness for Art reached its feverish pitch.

In her, Geok Hwa found a soul-mate who propagates what she herself believes in - a no-nonsense functional art form that extols technical competence. In the ventilated studio, she found herself more and more drawn to the order and simplicity of geometric clean lines. Out from the common kiln spouted pots, cups, teapots, bowls and vases in economic colours, concise shapes and colummed reliefs. They serve her practical mind, her empirical hands just as her less sedentary hobbies in various sports serve her corporeal body.

With a repertoire of signs and reliance on English as her written code, Geok Hwa has to depend on a sign interpreter to explicate a docent’s, a teacher’s or another artist’s monologues. Without this middle person and bridge, exchange programmes would be futile; speeches, intelligible whilst the rhetoric, history and intricate meanings of Art and artworks would be lost or abstracted. Perhaps, this is why analytical Geok Hwa choose Ceramics. It requires no mediators in its study. She can learn by deduction, by following visual demonstrations, by testing hypotheses with her hands. In adapting Art to her life, and not life to Art, Geok Hwa unveils her clear insight of what Art should be, a servant of humankind and not their master.