“I think there’s so much richness and joy within immigrants' stories, and it feels more important than ever to share these.”— Cassy Oliphant

CNTRFLD. Your work often explores folklore, family memory and migration through recurring animal figures. Can you take us back to your childhood? Were there particular stories, traditions or experiences growing up that first sparked your imagination and continue to shape your practice today?

CO. Because my mother moved to England during her teens - and really wanted to assimilate into British culture, my childhood stories were far more rooted in European folklore than Chinese or Indo-Malay stories. I didn’t have a sense of Chinese myth until far more recently. That said, I spent a lot of time reading stories, listening to audio books and soaking up stories as a child. I spent a lot of time in my imagination growing up, and I was constantly arranging my Polly Pockets into little communities of people, creating interconnected worlds. This aspect of creativity has definitely followed me into adulthood, and I still listen to stories as I make art - whether they’re podcasts or audiobooks. I find exploring artmaking and story-telling a much richer way of understanding culture and heritage than academic forms of research alone.

CNTRFLD. You describe your paintings, embroidery and cyanotypes as different ways of thinking about memory, identity and transformation. How do you decide which medium a particular idea belongs to, and what does each allow you to express that the others cannot?

CO. There are many different stages of my art making - for instance, painting details that can find their way into textiles pieces, or deciding which mythical animals are intuitively part of the piece.

After I’ve selected the photo, I want to work with in my piece, I work in fairly ‘fixed ways’ to produce a digital inversion on acetate. I’m still making decisions - how transparent I want particular parts of the image - but at that point I’m relatively in control. It’s when I reproduce the work onto textiles using cyanotype that unpredictability happens.  I don’t quite know how much sunshine will impact the image, or if some of the image will develop more than others. There’s an element of surrender; no replication is completely precise. I feel that this is a reflection of memories being unstable; they’re changeable depending on who’s sharing the memory, or story. I don’t doubt that my act of retelling moments from my family's lives creates its own distortion.

Later in my textile making, when I’m sewing Peranakan embroidery and hand stitching animals into my work, I tend to reflect on family stories, and I work quite intuitively with the fabric. I deliberately fragment the fabric as I cut into it and then reinforce the remaining embroidery. There’s an internal acknowledgement that my memories are fragments, but a deep desire to assemble and understand the pieces I’ve been given.

CNTRFLD. As a British Singaporean artist, your practice brings together Chinese and European folklore alongside your own family histories. How has your understanding of your dual heritage evolved over time, and in what ways has making art helped you navigate that journey?

CO. I would describe myself as having a very mixed heritage - both English and Scottish on my father’s side, and Chinese and Singaporean on my mother’s. I was absolutely raised in ideas of British culture, but as I was raised by a single mother who was already trying to assimilate into English customs and norms, there was always some anxiety about whether we were performing that correctly. I think her desire to fit ‘safely’ into society meant a slight rejection of her own customs. We would go Scottish dancing on a Saturday morning rather than Chinese school. I find the duality within my mum, and the degree we all learnt to mask, really fascinating. She has 2 different accents - one is very much ‘Singlish’, the other is quite well-spoken English, and she’ll alternate between the 2 depending on who she’s talking to. I’m sure I internalised this duality, and at times it’s been slightly confusing - I definitely didn’t look like most of the people I grew up around in my predominantly white community, but I also am relatively different from my Singaporean family.

Making art has been such a safe space to explore this otherness that I’ve felt growing up. It’s been a place to understand those liminal spaces without being too judgmental about them. It’s a place to literally stitch together different aspects of myself, to try to create something cohesive despite my mixed heritage sometimes feeling fragmented.

CNTRFLD. Your work suggests that identity isn’t fixed, but something that shifts across generations, places and personal experience. Has there been a particular moment in your life when your understanding of belonging changed, and did that alter the direction of your practice?

CO. I think becoming a mother was a significant shifting point. What customs did I want to share with my children? Even if I wasn’t really exposed to them as a child? After a few years of loosely exploring European folklore as a theme within my painting, I realised I wasn’t being entirely authentic to a part of my identity, and curiosity has brought me toward familial stories, as well as Chinese myths as a background and story-vehicle for these. I’m acutely aware that my mother is getting older and forgetting many of her own stories of her upbringing - so it feels really essential for me to capture these whilst I can, and for my girls to have a sense of this rich mixed heritage.

As an adult, we’ve started to cobble together Lunar New Year celebrations, even though I didn’t grow up with this - and we’ve really created our own version of this - not quite traditional, but a really important part of our year.

My name - Cassy (Cassandra) Oliphant - doesn’t give any sense of my Asian heritage, but if you look at me, I wouldn’t necessarily be ‘read’ as British. My experience of belonging and occupying has really come through artmaking and putting work into the world that has a foot in each side of my heritage.

CNTRFLD. Folklore has traditionally been passed from one generation to the next, often changing with every retelling. In many ways, diaspora communities experience culture in a similar way. Do you see your work as a way of preserving inherited stories, reimagining them, or perhaps creating entirely new ones?

CO. Traditional folklore and oral stories have always been open to change and variation - and absolutely splinter into separate but connected versions of the same story. This is largely how my own family stories have been passed to me - various versions being told, different memories given emphasis, competing importance held. There is something solid and tangible in terms of family photos as archival material - these are definite moments in time, but still the stories attached to each one have really depended on who I talk to.

I think through the act of presenting stories through art, as they travelled - both geographically and generationally - there’s no way of really preserving an original version. I certainly don’t want to pretend to be an authority on a particular custom or cultural norm. In this way, I think I am reimagining them - stories refracted through my own lens.