EXHIBITION

In Lost in Wanderland, ERYN mobilises the formal logic of Snakes and Ladders as a working schema for mapping affective trajectories. Her papercut compositions, ranging from intricate single layered cutouts to multi-layered dioramas, reimagines the gameboard as an endless cycle of ascents and descents, without ever reaching a conclusion. The grid constructs a procedural architecture, reframing the traditional two-dimensional gameboard into a spatial construct, reduced to fragments or expanded into corridors and stairways drawn from the architecture of Penang. Within this configuration, ladders no longer guarantee ascent, nor do serpents signify descent; both become ambivalent passages through which the artist maps shifting states of mind, each composition recording a moment of passage, pause, or return.

The work maps an exploration of choices and their consequences, animated by a varied cast of figures and the unseen forces that hold us in stasis. Material practice anchors this mapping. The act of cutting is both process and inquiry: precise, repetitive incisions externalise internal rhythms and render invisible states legible in negative space. Paper, simultaneously delicate and exact, carries the paradoxes the work seeks to make visible: vulnerability coexisting with endurance, erasure producing form, absence constituting architecture. Layers accumulate like temporal strata, while voids and overlaps register recurrence, their repeated gestures tracing a sustained exploration of the conditions of recovery. The series was produced over a prolonged period of psychological strain, and its making records that history without collapsing into autobiography.

Conceptually, Lost in Wanderland reframes play as an epistemic condition: a system in which chance, repetition and rule-governed movement disclose the structures by which we orient ourselves. The ladders’ promise of ascent and the snakes’ inevitability are held in tension to expose an economy of progress that is cyclical rather than teleological. In this reframing, wandering no longer signals failure but embodies a method, a continuous negotiation with contingency in which fragility is converted into a modality of persistence. ERYN’s paper compositions thus render a rigorous poetics of endurance, fragile in matter, exact in form, and uncompromising in their refusal of resolution.