Ponnapa Prakkamakul
About | Ponnapa Prakkamakul is a Thai contemporary visual artist and a landscape architect who uses the painting process as a tool to experience, understand, and connect with her surrounding environment. Through her work, she aims to gain a better understanding of cultural displacement and isolation issues as an immigrant.
Ponnapa holds a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design where she received Lowthorpe Fellowship Award upon graduation. She is also a recipient of David Bethuel Jamieson Artist of Color Residency & Fellowship at C-Scape Dune Shack in Provincetown, Residence Lab’s artist-in-residence program at ACDC and the Pao Arts Center in Boston, and Manoog Family Artist Residency program at the Plumbing Museum in Watertown with four paintings in the museum’s permanent collection. Her work has also been exhibited, published, and collected throughout the US and in Asia. Ponnapa currently lives and works in Massachusetts.
Q&A
What are your earliest memories of being artistic? When I was in kindergarten, I would make something with my mum every day after dinner time. I remember very clearly in my head a scene of my mum cutting some paper or fabric and handing it to me to glue and paste. There was one week that I made a drawing of landscape of Bangkok combining the city’s skyline with the landscape near my house. During that time, the location of our house was considered the edge of Bangkok so there were some rice fields, a vernacular house, and local paddle boats.
My mum sent that drawing to a drawing competition in Japan, and it won an honorable mention award. I was six years old, and we were very excited.
Are you self-taught or formally educated in visual art? I was exposed to art from a very young age. My dad’s family runs a small silkscreen printing factory in Bangkok, and my mum is a painter. Growing up, I remember using a light table to do homework and playing hide and seek among large screen printing frames. I started to be my mum’s studio assistant when I was in junior high school, helping with exhibition installation and making some reproduction work. Although I was trained as a landscape architect, the experience from working with my mum has a strong influence on my artistic style. I enjoy working on both art and design projects, which to me has blurry boundaries between the two.
What is your creative process? Where are you finding ideas for your art these days? As a landscape architect and immigrant, environments – and our relationship to them – fundamentally inform my work. I am always seeking unique and impressive settings for inspiration and context for my artwork. I explore the landscape using the painting process as a tool to experience, understand, and form connections with new places by searching, studying, and collecting materials from landscapes, such as soil, plant, groundwater, and rust from found objects to depict the landscapes where they originate.
Since 2020, I noticed that my work has changed from site-specific work to time-based work. I am interested to see how my work will continue to evolve during this challenging time.
What’s your favorite place to see art, and why? I love all kinds of art, especially folk art. When I travel to new places, I always go to local markets, thrift stores, or even local houses. Folk art is everywhere, but on the other hand you kind of need to search for it among other functional objects. I like that it has a sense of discovery and has stories behind it—either about the culture, folklore, or anthropology.
Do you have any shows coming up? I have a show that just opened at Kingston Gallery called Samatha : Stillness in the Chaos. The exhibition includes 231 pieces of pastel drawings I made in 2020.
I also have some public art projects on view this summer. The ones that are already installed are “Snail Game Hopscotch” at the Greenway near the carousal and “All About Us” for Brookline Art Center at Monmouth Park. I will be working on a mural at Oxford Street, a paint box at Philip Square, and also a hopscotch game at Mary Soo Hoo Park in Chinatown.
See more from Ponnapa
Website: https://ponnapa.com/
Instagram: @giftponnapa
Facebook: Ponnapa.com