3 weeks, 2 artists, 1 residency programme. Artists Ada Bond and Yang-En Hume share about their artistic practice and reflect on what they were working on during their residency period.
Could you introduce yourself and what inspires your practice?
Hume: "My cultural background — being mixed race, and a second-generation immigrant — has been a huge influence on my practice. I was born and raised in Australia to an Australian father and a Singaporean mother. We lived in Southeast Asia for a few formative years of my childhood, and even after we returned to Sydney, my family and I were always travelling back and forth to Singapore".
"Growing up between countries shaped a large part of my childhood, and it's pushed me to explore ideas of hybridity, home, belonging, otherness, and what it feels like to be unsettled. I moved to London almost a decade ago, so as an adult, home and belonging are still things I'm negotiating, just in different contexts now".
Installation view: No Break in Summer, Ada Bond, Mandy Zhang Art, 2026
Bond: "I’ve always had a fascination and affinity for animals, and I’m particularly interested in the emotions and characteristics people project onto them. They can carry very human feelings like vulnerability, embarrassment, desire or dread, but still retain something unknowable. The ladybird as a motif became interesting to me because of its association with cuteness: one being charming and harmless, but quickly becoming unnerving and even grotesque in clusters. The tipping point between cuteness and excess was often in the back of my mind during the residency".
Installation view: No Break in Summer, Ada Bond and Yang-En Hume, Mandy Zhang Art, 2026
Hume: "My mum's family are Peranakan, though I wasn't raised with much knowledge of that heritage. As an adult, I've been slowly learning more about Peranakan history and culture in Singapore. I've become really drawn to their textile traditions, particularly batik. Batik designs travelled across trade and colonial networks, with patterns, techniques and materials circulating and mixing along the way — Singaporean batik especially draws from Chinese, European and Malay influences. I've started incorporating floral motifs from my own batik collection into my paintings and collages, as a symbol of that cultural and material hybridity".
Could you speak a little about the direction you have taken during this period of the residency?
Hume: "It was such a pleasure to undertake this residency — thank you so much for having me! In the lead-up, I thought a lot about how to use the three weeks effectively. Because the timeframe was limited, I decided to focus on studies and plan ideas for a new body of work that I'll develop over the coming year, rather than trying to produce finished pieces".
"During my masters, I started making unstretched paintings using family photographic archives, in which I concealed or removed the figures. I also began cutting, repairing and stitching the canvas surface as a way of enacting my experience of dislocation within a mixed-race, second-generation immigrant identity".
"I wanted to use the residency to build on this direction, so I worked with photocopies of family photographs, collaging and painting onto them. Working at a smaller scale, with quick and easy materials and techniques, let me play with composition and pattern intuitively. I ended up producing a series of small works, which I'm excited to develop further into larger, unstretched paintings".
Installation view: No Break in Summer, Ada Bond, Mandy Zhang Art, 2026
Bond: "The residency gave me an opportunity to experiment with a larger scale, particularly with Fluff, which created an interesting push and pull with the smaller paintings".
Multi-medium decisions
Hume: "Materiality is central to my work. A new piece might evolve from an idea or a sketch, but often it starts with thinking through materials, and researching the histories behind the ones that matter to me. In the past these have included the quilts my grandmother made for me as a child, batik I've collected from Singapore, my postpartum bedsheets, family photographs, spices traded across Southeast Asia during the colonial spice trade, and the species of timber the British used to build their naval ships".
"From there, my work tends to unfold through progressive stages of intervention and translation. At one end, I work directly with archival materials — using found objects, like my grandmother's quilts, with little or no alteration. From there, I might move towards replication, creating copies of objects through mould-making or photocopying photographs. Finally, I introduce further transformation, intervening more deliberately through collage, stitching, paint, or woodworking, shifting objects and materials away from their original function entirely".
"All of these processes are underpinned by the understanding that history and memory are embedded in objects and materials, and that making can be an act of care and cultural continuity".
Installation view: No Break in Summer, Yang-En Hume, Mandy Zhang Art, 2026
Bond: "I tend to work at a small, intimate scale because I like being physically close to the painting while I’m making it. That scale also suits the preciousness of the imagery, and forces the viewer to come close to it too".
Has working alongside another artist created any unexpected changes in how you developed your work?
Hume: “It was a pleasure to work alongside Ada! She is an incredible artist and a really lovely person. We overlapped at the Slade, and I love her work, but we hadn’t actually met in person before. I’m really happy that I got to know her through this residency. I was impressed by her work ethic and her resourcefulness - she was in every day, creating her beautiful, haunting paintings, without needing a lot of materials or space. Ada was finishing paintings for an exhibition, which encouraged me to try and resolve some of my own collages before the end of the residency. Without her there, I probably would have continued experimenting and researching without finding resolution. It was very helpful to have that little push each day and to be held accountable. I’m also convinced that her colour palette started creeping into my own work!”
Bond: “Working alongside Yang-En was so helpful. I really admired the delicacy and thoughtfulness of her approach, and having her perspective there made it much easier to bounce ideas around and take risks with my own work. There was mutual support between us, which suited the experimental nature of the residency. I usually find starting something is the scariest part, so having someone alongside you who was equally open to trying things made that feel much less daunting”.
The residency provided both artists with a space to experiment, collaborate, and develop new directions within their practices. Through material exploration and shared support, Hume and Bond were able to push their work beyond their usual approaches, leaving the residency with new ideas to carry forward.