Hannah Lim's flamboyant snuff bottles
'I wanted to somehow find a way of breathing life into them by giving them arms, legs and eyes.'
During the Qing dynasty, when it was illegal to smoke tobacco, owning a beautifully decorated snuff bottle was all the rage for the upper class. A vessel to hold snuff (a scented, powdered tobacco), these bottles facilitated a social ritual, and were carried around for dopamine hits on the go. Snuff was considered to have medicinal properties, too. As the eighteenth century progressed, the trend spread through the social classes and across the country. Concurrent to the proliferation of snuff bottles, there was a rise in ‘Chinoiserie’ - the European imitation of Chinese design and culture.
Pushing against the rigidness of racial identities, the artist Hannah Lim delves deep into her research of Chinoiserie and ‘Ornamentalism’ (as propounded by feminist theorist Anne Annlin Cheng) to create snuff bottles which are purposefully flamboyant. Of mixed Singaporean and British heritage, Lim looked to the objects and jewellery dotted around her family home to gain inspiration for her first snuff bottle series. As her art and research matured, she felt her snuff bottles were ‘too reflective of [herself]…too ornamental and static.’ Uniquely identifiable, her more recent snuff bottles have grown arms and legs - quite literally.
‘I wanted to somehow find a way of breathing life into them by giving them arms, legs and eyes’, she tells me. Made from polymer clay and a muted rainbow paint palette, Lim’s snuff bottles are embellished with a multitude of motifs which are repeated throughout her multi-media practice, including birds, fish and plants. They are alive, armed with a two-pronged approach to combating the stasis their creator is conscious of. Outwardly, they are ostentatious in the best possible way, unsubtly escaping fixed notions of identity and race. Inwardly, there is a hidden surprise.
Their interactivity originates from Lim’s careful consideration of the interior details of traditional snuff bottles. She explains: ‘Many traditional glass snuff bottles were often intricately painted on the inside, in turn revealing a beautiful design through the glass on the outside.’ This detail intrigued Lim, prompting her to create a ‘layered experience’ for the modern-day beholder. Speaking to the tactility of a snuff bottle’s original purpose and design, Lim wanted her own sculptural objects to have an ‘inside’, only to be revealed by opening the lid.
When I saw Lim’s snuff bottles in person as part of her solo show titled Ornamental Mythologies, it was a real struggle to resist the impulse to lift the lids. I managed to, but only just. Test your own self-restraint by visiting Edinburgh Printmakers before November 20th.
