This project was awarded the ECU Graduation Award for Anti-Racism and Social Justice – Visual Arts, and received an Honourable Mention for the Thelma Ruck Keene Memorial Award for Ceramics (Circle Craft)
A focus of my art has been healing myself, and to make healing objects and situations for other people.
Right now, a lot of my ceramic art explores my Identity as a half Filipinx 2nd generation immigrant settler in Vancouver BC Canada. I like to make sculptures of identity objects. For me, that can be basketballs, cleaning supplies, plastic chairs, and beer bottles. The surfaces I paint are reminiscent both of the architecture in the Philippines, and my personal history (graffiti, band-aids, stitching things together, re-using objects).
I make work in a direct response to colonization of the Philippines, Philippine-Canadian relationships, care, and an urgency to preserve and discover our histories and to create solutions. With these Identity objects, I hope to ask questions as to why our histories are preserved the way they are, what we consider precious and why, and why is it that we choose the objects we do to preserve – why are these the objects are the objects we have left? how do they guide who we choose to be?
I hope that through these objects I can create a new history to aim towards, as well as bring comfort to people from similar colonial backgrounds.
Rancho Bawang is the name of the district where my family currently resides in the Philippines. It translates to “garlic ranch” named after the main export. My mom and her family would peel a massive amount of garlic to sell in the market to make money. the giant buckets sold for 5 pesos, less than 0.01 CAD.
