Dana Goh's Meanwhile Garden Explores Conditional Belonging Through Textile Flowers

Singaporean artist Dana Goh's installation Meanwhile Garden uses faux-fur yarn flowers to examine belonging as a conditional state shaped by care, control, and social pressure. The work, created in 2025 and measuring approximately 3 x 2 meters, features clusters of soft, irregular blooms that resemble ornamental flowers, fungi, and parasitic growths. Goh employs tufting and stitching techniques, referencing the gendered history of textile craft as analyzed by Rozsika Parker in The Subversive Stitch. The installation's large scale and curved frame give it a panoramic, aquarium-like structure, challenging the hierarchy that separates fine art from feminized domestic labor. Goh's palette of mint, turquoise, and lavender evokes commercial wellness, while fungal forms introduce bodily unease. The work draws on William Morris's idea of resistance in materials, highlighting the physical difficulty of construction and the social structures that determine artistic recognition. Meanwhile Garden presents identity as a managed plot, cultivated through repeated acts of selection and maintenance, never free from external interference.