Cassy Oliphant is a Leeds-based artist with British and Singaporean-Chinese heritage. Her work often begins with stories – some drawn from Chinese and European folklore, others from her own family history. She is fascinated by the way these tales overlap, shift, and sometimes contradict one another, and by how they change again when viewed through the lens of her bi-racial identity.

For Oliphant, stories are rarely whole. Some are carefully passed down, others are half-remembered, and many are hidden or lost. Within her family, memories feel fragile – suspended across geographies, time, and the fallibility of recollection. Her practice has become a way of holding onto what might otherwise fade, embracing memory’s instability rather than denying it.

The materials she chooses embody this sense of care and repair. Peranakan embroidery, with its simultaneous acts of stitching and cutting away, creates forms that are both delicate and strong – a process Oliphant sees as a metaphor for memory itself, which reinforces certain parts, reveals gaps, and sometimes leaves behind only a scaffold. Cyanotype allows images to emerge partially and sometimes fade, echoing memory’s impermanence. Painting introduces a more fluid, intuitive, and playful energy, reflecting the symbolic, shape-shifting nature of folklore.

This exhibition weaves together these strands of Oliphant’s practice: folklore, personal history, and the tactile processes of textiles, cyanotype, and painting. At its core is an act of resistance – a refusal to let stories slip away. By assembling fragments, Oliphant seeks not to create a perfect image, but to honour what remains.

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