Three Pockets
Full of Rye

“Three Pockets Full of Rye” is a play on the well-known nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence” and Singapore’s “three food baskets” for ensuring our collective food security.

Sing a song of sixpence,

A pocketful of rye.

Four and twenty blackbirds,

Baked in a pie.

And so it goes. Rye refers to a hardy cereal plant that tolerates poor soils and is widely grown for grain. When we contemplate the events that visit the king, who gets his fancy pie, and the maid, who gets her nose pecked off, we start to get a sense of how our familiar, innocent rhymes broods over very human contemplations over qualities of food and who gets it. Not to forget pease-pudding nine days old and the pig that gets the roast beef and the pig that gets none? Food as object, metaphor, memory, identity and cultural event gives text colour, texture. These ideas written into our collective histories shape our collective consciousness. 

“Three Pockets Full of Rye” is also a “living” art installation where the artist uses found objects to interpret her own relationship with food and the concepts of sustainability and security. In her conversations with Tan Hang Chong, an avid naturalist, outdoor enthusiast and guardian of Foodscape Collective, they contemplate the idea of connecting with big concepts of sustainability and security around the issue of food through first knowing our own bodies, thinking about our own bodies and what we put in it. Nourishment comes not just from physical inputs but also the intellectual and the emotional. In the process of knowing oneself, could we start to embrace a kind of introspection that grows from seeing our bodies as a part of a whole, in connection with others, communities and a wider ecosystem that includes our environment and our lands?

As a towering glass city mirroring the landscape around us, “Three Pockets Full of Rye'' also alludes to our modern life of living to be seen and yet with much hidden from view. It is also our relationship with objects, the having, the wanting and the out of reach. 

In the course of making the installation, the artist has looked to local communities that have deeply engaged with issues around Singapore’s food sustainability and their thoughts on our three baskets for food security - diversifying food sources, growing locally and growing overseas. More importantly, they have let these issues drive meaningful action in connecting people around ideas of growing, giving, saving waste and turning them into what can eventually renew our very earth. These communities include Food Citizen, Foodscape Collective, Fridge Restock Community SG, Green Circle Eco-Farm, KampongBishan and The Soup Kitchen Project (Singapore). All the items in the installation are the artist’s own, donated or found through Hock Siong, Old Habits, Rare Collections, Something Old Something New, Salvation Army, Cash Converters, Carousell and the Singapore Really Really Free Market (SRRFM). All items will return to the community after the installation to be composted, reused, repurposed or recycled, leaving nothing but connections made and renewed life for objects and the people around them. 

The artist invites you to contemplate the living installation and participate to share your thoughts, your book reading list from children’s books, fantasy novels, cook books to science books and your favourite quotes from them that have inspired you to take a closer look at your own relationship with food, nature and conscious living. On this website, you will read what others have shared and could perhaps come across books and lines of enquiry that peak your interests.

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The artist thanks Adel T. Ng, Derrick Lim, Izyan Nadzirah, Jennifer Teo, Tan Hang Chong, Teng Kee Wee and Woon Tien Wei for their invaluable support. 

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The growers are 9eighteenblooms by Glinta, Organic Auntie, Pelanplant by Brian Lim, Terraforme.sg and Wilson Leong.

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