Among the many meanings of abstraction is the focus on images that are at a distance from their origins. This understanding of abstraction is central to many of Savanhdary Vongpoothorn’s layered, textured and sensuous canvases. The references to Laotian textile design and creation endows them with the sense of a fabric-like nature, gives the feel of cloth wrapped around bodies and of threads woven into complex symmetrical patterns. Here, the distance from origins is expressed as a separation from the material forms of Lao culture. At the same time these works are a visual reference to the stretching or bending of forms, the breaking up of shapes in the natural or constructed environment, all of which create an expressive effect through the warmly coloured grid and visual illusions of movement and travel. This visual play suggests the sense that migration or movement is a means through which cultural forms get recoded and translated. Savanhdary constructs intricate laced knots of colour and texture in work which expresses the possibilities presented by travel, migration and the subsequent remixture that emerges upon crossing through different cultural worlds.