Never Entirely in Sight

Some of the things we surround ourselves with or encounters we have in life refuse to stay the same, and we know this. Still, it is these that we strive the most to hold on to.

Never Entirely in Sight is an exhibition of work made by Dana Goh as part of her personal journey and investigation into self-identity, shaped by her family’s migration from China to Singapore – possibly via Malaysia – to end up in Vienna and presently in London. Primarily a textile-artist, Goh uses the characteristics found in this medium – supleness, shifting tonalities, resiliance to be fixed – to create expressions of the ambiguity she experiences in a seemingly never ending sense of non-belonging. Soft sculpture and interactive installation, alongside her already iconic tufted rugs with garden motifs, welcome the visitor to temporarily walk through a reality familiar to most multinationals today.

Nostalgia and notions of the romantic, or ‘to romanticise’ to be precise, are recurring themes in Goh’s work. For her, in the context of origin and self-identity, to romanticise is a methodology, a form of defense method and subconcious technique to give a narrative to stories that help us understand who we are but are riddled by contradictions. There is a want for clarity, reassurance, and not least a sense of belonging in an increasingly hostile world. With recent years’ rise in nationalism across western continents, Goh developed a stronger awareness of her own position as a multinational whose identity can’t be linked to one nation or one set of values. Her paternal family tree is there; her mother’s semi-drawn and dependent on stories passed down verbally, with time turning to ‘chinese whispers’.

            At around the same time as Goh was coming to accept this ambiguity textile as a medium and tufting in particular entered her practice. Waking up in her west London flat and daily travels to the studio, a slow bus journey, she felt neither at home nor away from home. Nowhere, as far as she could remember, had truly been home. Hours spent in the studio, pulling and twisting yarn, did not change that but it gave a pictorial form to those things and encounters that lingered just outside her field of clear vision, never entirely were in sight. She never attempts to resolve the ambiguity that these incidents hold in her memory, the ‘in-between’, but she finds an expression for this precise suspense. With her latest body of work, she is telling us that to not see, to always guess but never to fully know, is also a reality.

‘Garden’ is a re-ocurring and important motif in Goh’s work. Besides having grown up Singapore, known for its many public green spaces, Goh spent her teenage years in Vienna, surrounded by some of Europe’s oldest and finest gardens. In her artistic practice, the garden serves as a metaphor for self-identity and in particular by multi-nationals: constantly in flux and with soft grounds. Inevitably subject to conditions set out by geography as well as practices deeply rooted in culture and traditions of its host, every garden will have what one might call ‘essential qualities’, i.e. characteristics that recur annually with their season. Within these, on surface level, processes of choice unfold. These are what gives a garden its aesthetics. To Goh, human beings are much the same. We carry our origin within us, this being our essential quality that provides us with a sense of belonging. As in

Goh’s case, migration and ambiguity relating to origin may result in doubts and prompt a search for ‘essence’.

On show as part of Never Entirely in Sight are Where the Wind Blows and Meanwhile Garden, the former having been exhibited in Bursan, South Korea, last year where it was met with both public and critical recognition. The latter, an ambitious textile tufted in multiple yarns, measures an impressive 210 x 300 cm. Much the final version of endless studies made plein-air, it is influenced both in pictorial approach and formal qualities by Claude Monet’s late Waterlilies paintings, housed in Paris’ Musée l’Orangerie. In an hommage to Monet’s exhausting attempts to capture the fleeting moment in pictorial form, and the institutions adherence to the immersive aspect of the paintings, Goh built a wooden structure to present her work in a free-standing, curvaceous manner. The installation is an extension of her investigation into the garden as an all-encompassing, interactive space.

Dana Goh (b. 2001, Singapore) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London, working primarily with textiles. Her practice is a material-lead investigation into self-identity, migration, memory and nostalgia, and the potential of handcraft as process for activating memories and creating a sense of belonging.

Goh graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Newcastle University (2023), where she was awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Global Scholarship, and later completed her MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art (2024).

Her work has been exhibited across the UK, Vienna, New York, Shanghai, Singapore, and Seoul. She was a finalist for the VAO UK & International Emerging Artist Award (2024, Young Artist), selected for the Emerging Woman Artist Award Art Prize (2024), and longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize (2025).

Goh is the founder of Qloud Collective, a curatorial platform supporting emerging artists through cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchange.