Maneerat Thamnarak
Maneerat Thamnarak or Bo is a Thai artist whose works explore overlooked and untold stories of the environment she encounters. Born in 1994, Maneerat was raised in Chumphon, Thailand. Her fascination in the untold domestic spheres began when she went to study Fine and Applied Art at Prince of Songkla University in Pattani, the southernmost province in Thailand. There, she was exposed to a diverse range of cultures and religions: Muslims, Buddhists and Chineses. Visiting friends from different cultural backgrounds, she immediately took interest in their kitchens in which she found detailed records of different ways of life. She began to use the forms of cooking utensils in her wooden sculptural works. The cooking utensils connected closely to the wooden materials which were leftover scraps acquired from the households she visited. For Bo, equally important as the final images and forms is her choice of materials and the stories embedded to them. Besides wood, another material of interest is latex. Rooted in her childhood memories, her works combine latex with the local iconography such as her grandmother’s Sarong fabric patterns, widely worn by many Thai women. In her latest work, she used latex to tell the untold stories of rubber farmers and the abandoned rubber plantations after the latex price drastically dropped .
