Tiffany Loy resists being narrowly defined as a textile artist. Not because she rejects the medium, but because what truly interests her lies beyond it: using textiles to test how our eyes perceive colour and depth, how vision hesitates, how colour refuses to settle, and how perception shifts when form is pushed slightly out of alignment.
Trained in industrial design in Singapore and textile weaving in Kyoto, before completing an MA in Textiles at London’s Royal College of Art, Loy treats weaving as a way of thinking rather than a tradition to uphold. Skewed and deliberately destabilised, her works compress space and colour into surfaces that hover between dimensions.
In Loy’s latest exhibition, Between Line and Form, she returns to these questions through eight woven works developed over the past year, building on her earlier Depth Exploration series. Placed alongside Kirsten Coelho’s architectural ceramics, Loy’s works probe light and depth, revealing how repetition and restraint give rise to presence and form.
One of the larger works grew out of Loy’s fascination with light and shadow, or rather their refusal to behave as expected. “Shadows are never completely black,” she says. “They’re always a shade of blue, or a strange sort of grey, a colour you can’t quite name. The same can be said of light.” Woven from fine threads in subtly varied hues, the work appears colourful at first glance yet resists clear identification. Dark areas never fully darken; light areas never quite resolve. “That moment of hesitation, not being able to decide what colour you’re looking at… that’s very interesting to me,” she says.
Several works mark a shift away from the traditional waffle weave, where peaks and valleys align neatly in a grid. By deliberately displacing these points, Loy creates topographic surfaces that zigzag and pull against one another. Push the structure too far, she notes, and the work collapses into flatness. The challenge lies in finding what she calls a “sweet spot”, where dimensionality holds but order loosens.
Though her process demands sustained, almost mathematical focus, which she likens to running a marathon, Loy acknowledges that precision is never guaranteed. She describes the works as flesh rather than skin: pliable, responsive, capable of pushing back, and at times “organic and messy”. For Loy, the medium is not textile but “pliable line”, a way of testing perception at its finest scale. Hot glass and metal wires are simply other expressions of this logic. “It’s not so much the material, but the behaviour… It’s something I can experiment with for a lifetime,” she says.
Loy delights in watching audiences lean in close, at times within 40cm, drawn by something they cannot immediately identify. “People ask me, ‘What colour is this?’” she says. “It can sound naive, but it’s actually quite profound, because colour is a spectrum.” In that pause of confusion and contemplation, perception loosens. For Loy, that moment is where curiosity takes hold, and where looking truly begins.
This story first appeared in the March 2026 issue of GRAZIA Singapore.
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