Epoxy, Locket Necklace, Lace, Canvas Print, Dome.

2023

 

I based the imagery of this sculpture from a trove of old family photographs I found in our ancestral home in Batangas. I listened to my family’s anecdotes, living vicariously through their rural history, trying to relate how all these are passed through generations and connect to me.

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I tried to process this history through my work, grappling with and trying to embrace the non-tangible inheritances from my maternal lineage: Our physical features that colonial mentality has once taught me to hate. My hitchhiker’s thumb and high knee caps. My grandmother’s fierceness and her long wavy hair. My grandfather’s penchant for walking in circles. My mother’s meekness. Our shyness. Our ancestral and generational traumas.

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Through making this work, I tried to process what inheriting all these means, and tried to create an ancestral mythos that I can come to terms with.