ARTIST STATEMENT

My career in humanitarian work with refugees and displaced people took me across continents and into senior leadership. It also kept me at a distance from my tight-knit family in the Philippines, my culture, and my country—and I still live away from it all. My practice now is a return: a reclamation of cultural identity shaped by lived experience of migration, relocation, and colonization. Through abstraction and layered materials, I surface stories that are often made invisible.

 

My work sits at the intersections of abstract mixed media, social justice and a curiosity to learn more about decolonialism, gender and power. I deepen both my craft and my soul through scholar-activist texts, podcasts, and the wisdom of writers who came before me. I experiment with materials and draw from personal, ancestral, and collective histories of erasure, assimilation, belonging, and resistance within displacement, migration, and diaspora.

 

In recent solo exhibitions, I have returned to questions of visibility and invisibility, including through Recto-Verso, an art form that asks the viewer to consider what is shown in front, what is withheld, and what stories are held behind and beyond.

 

I explore how to undo inherited visual languages shaped by colonial systems of knowledge, and to personalize marks, materials, and meanings. Over time, I recognized how my history has been shaped by erasure, invisibility, and marginality. In my mixed media practice, the surface is not a neutral ground—sometimes, it is where histories (mine, and the many peoples and cultures I have lived with) are layered, obscured, and rearticulated.

 

I am learning an ancient syllabary that few in my native Philippines know and researching ancient forms of art and the Western-centric aesthetics I inherited through education and exposure. I began signing my name in this script and inscribe my ancient syllabary Baybayin onto the work’s surface, placing it in tension with the colonial alphabet. I use collage with meaning – surfacing, trying not to become invisible.

 

Abstraction offers a way to create without reproducing the same systems of legibility. Scraps of found material carry memory—covering, revealing, and returning. What remains visible is partial; what disappears is not gone. Erasure, in this sense, is not about loss but what is pushed back, and what other forms of presence can still emerge.

 

In my work, I return to the tension between my privilege and marginality, visibility and invisibility, presence and absence—what can be named, what must be felt, and what survives in layers. Uwi Ka Na (Come Home) is my ongoing practice of coming back to myself.