School of Creative
Industries
Theodora Leow Ern-Wei
With a bachelor of arts double major degree in psychology and history, Theodora has worked as a therapist for children with special needs.
Interested in the arts as a means of understanding, expression, healing and engaging with one’s internal world, she pursued an MA Art Therapy degree at LASALLE College of the Arts to further hone her knowledge of art psychotherapy. During her time in the programme, Theodora worked with children impacted by family trauma and with individuals in medical settings.
Theodora’s personal art-making uses sketching, painting, music and creative writing to capture and reflect her engagement with the world. Her tendency to introduce soft, delicate elements while exploring unfamiliar and new materials reflects her sense of identity and place in society, inspiring warmth and comfort amidst challenging and confronting realities.
Work
The Debatable Lands
Aluminium plates, copper plates, wire, wool fibers, wooden frame
45 x 60 x 20 cm
(2025)
The Debatable Lands explores the intersections that a person must navigate between life and death, health and illness.
Health is a mutable state within which someone evaluates if they are living well, or if there is still more to be desired. The hospital, in providing care, rightfully magnifies the importance of ‘health’. Yet, this risks diminishing it to a ‘thing’ to be helped, worked on and investigated. A person—subjected to the natural progressions of their body—seeks a miracle or a moment of relief, but again finds themselves tethered to procedures, medical models, machines and medications.
Yet, these are protective and purposeful, enabling one to keep living well. Shifting through the physical oversaturation—or desensitisation—of one's senses (poking, prodding) and sensibilities (prognoses, prescriptions) one may overexert the soul or lose it.
Fascinated by how a person’s real and imagined worlds interact with rhythms of society, people and time, the artist believes that imagination and relationship weave necessary elements into one's inner life—softness, comfort, joy, hope, or grit, strength, fortitude—amidst the transitions in their external world. Art may become one’s voice, lens and anchor, reaching deep and distant crevices of emotion and experience, making this life more expressible, endurable and enriched.
This artwork confronts viewers to explore these inescapable contrasts in life on this side of eternity, asking, how might one find faith?
