Myra Eskes

Lives and works in Singapore

Artist statement

Myra Eskes’ practice investigates the unstable relationships between bodies, objects and the systems through which value is assigned, exchanged and maintained. Working across sculpture, installation and collage, she explores how material and human lives are shaped by processes of attachment, classification, consumption and care. Eskes is interested in what objects reveal about the structures in which they exist. Discarded, donated and found materials carry traces of use, desire, labour and loss; through displacement and reconfiguration, she gives these objects new relationships and allows their histories to remain visible. Material is not passive in her practice but acts as a form of agency, resisting fixed meaning and generating unexpected associations. Increasingly, the human body becomes a parallel site of investigation. Vulnerable yet resilient, individual yet subject to systems beyond its control, the body becomes a lens through which Eskes considers questions of diversity, belonging, health and institutional power. Her work reflects on the ways bodies are measured, categorised, protected and valued, and on the tensions that arise when systems designed to care for them instead determine access, recognition or possibility. This interest is informed by Eskes’ earlier career in international medical technology, where she worked within systems concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of the human body. Her artistic practice does not illustrate that experience but...

Artwork