School of Creative
Industries
Celeste Choo
Celeste Choo completed her BAcc in Accountancy at Nanyang Technological University in 2014 and has since embarked on a multidisciplinary career across finance and education, underpinned by her drive, versatility and inexhaustible curiosity.
Meaningful encounters with language-limited clients inspired Celeste to train as an art therapist. Through clinical placements in healthcare settings, she has worked extensively with clients receiving elder or palliative care. Celeste’s own art is characterised by an eclectic play of media and art forms, focusing on non-human interactions that shape memory and reality. This infatuation with transitory phenomena often imbues her works with a paradoxical sense of lively decay or elusive intimacy.
Celeste is the recipient of two postgraduate scholarships: the LASALLE MA Merit Award and the Australian, New Zealand and Asian Creative Arts Therapies Association (ANZACATA) Scholarship for Masters Students.
Work
Yours, Mine, Ours
Installation of stitched plants and objects
200 x 150 x 100 cm
2023
Ruminations on fleeting meetings birthed forty-two memory objects. Erosion by social and material forces leaves just a handful. A de-composed installation, Yours, Mine, Ours is the artist’s uneasy acceptance of memory as finite, frail and ephemeral. It quietly observes decay’s shaping of space and the phantasies we are tempted to inject into that potential.
Thesis abstract
Own sweet time: A qualitative inquiry on the practitioner's engagement in slow artmaking in palliative care art therapy
Slow food, slow living, slow craft – contemporary societies are enamoured with slowness’ implicit rejuvenating qualities. Situated in the context of a palliative care hospice in Singapore, this thesis is a qualitative inquiry into purposeful engagement in slow artmaking. A heuristic, arts-based research methodology was used to surface observations through a practitioner-researcher using the psychodynamic therapeutic modality. Rigorous thematic analysis with supervision has distilled these observations into key emergent themes. The discussion revolves around how slow artmaking enabled therapeutic attunement by increasing attention to relational, temporal and material factors beyond subjective control. Given a context where artmaking is often frustrated or resisted, this thesis offers insights for art therapists in healthcare settings favouring tacit, nonverbal approaches.