ATELIER
OF HEALING

Chapter 1: Delft to Powder Blue

Feeling blue—the feeling of blue. Where it might take us, from room to room, memory to memory. The affective range is...

Chapter 2: Prussian to St Patrick's Blue

The blue light that casts itself over everything in the waiting room. It can be cold, clinical, bereft of feeling... 

Chapter 3: Teal to Bleu de France

If blue had a taste to it. Would it be tart or rancid? Would it be biting, sometimes bittersweet? All our life moments should have a flavour, or at least be assigned one. It’s an attempt at recognition, of everything that happens to us, to account for their enduring effect, also their passage and temporality. 

With Jovan Ang and Kishore Kalaichalvan, we read epistolary poems to fathers. Through Rin Azhar and Trent Busch, we receive poem messages to mothers. Witness the frenetic lines in Kemlyn Tan Bappe’s account of a strong armed robbery.

Lim Yi Tian’s “Sixteen Meals that You Might Have Eaten in a Dream” is a long poem of threaded instalments, where we are told...

Chapter 4: Space Cadet to Liberty

The blue rinse of contemplation. “Take a leap of faith,” as Kierkegaard would say. Note the circularity, the notions of...  

Chapter 5: Cobalt to Cornflower Blue

Identity. And blue’s every hue across. How do we grapple with our deep sense of self? What of matters revolving around gender, esteem, bullying, loneliness, anxiety, depression, suicide?

Chapter 6: Midnight to Fluorescent Blue

What shade of blue is sadness? You can’t blue pencil that kind of blue. Whether it’s Kathryn Sadakierski’s anxiety or Srinjay Chakravarti’s migraine, what begins in the mind can become so distressing, it seems downright dreadful. Such affliction can seem simply impossible to endure...

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Chapter 7: Ultramarine to Ruddy Blue

We take you across the deep blue sea. Into new shores. Here are border crossings of every kind. Across place and time. Across culture. Across idea and ideology. Across emotion, and what to expect of it. Inhabit these lyric spaces, and understand the power of the anecdotal. Take in the shared experience...

Chapter 8: Savoy to Resolution Blue

Let’s bring into blue the true blue. Of what it takes to soothe and mend. ​How do we move beyond our pain to receive comfort?