Artist Statement
Through the practice of glassblowing, I create sculptures that come together to form larger interactive and multi-sensory installations that incorporate video, scent, and performance.
My work addresses the objectification and victimization of Asian women and engages with my expression of femininity as a Filipina in the Western world. I sculpt and interpret life forms through glass sculpture. Upon closer inspection, one beholds amorphous body parts slowly transmuting into tendrils or tentacles. My goal is to elicit interspecies empathy between humans and other lifeforms.
Motivated by the longstanding intimacies of my culture to nature, I decolonize the histories of plants and other life forms. My work is a reimagining of nature barely surviving a dystopian future wracked by industrial pollution. I encourage BIPOC-led strategies towards environmental justice and climate change.
While the sculptures present the power and beauty of the female body, upon closer inspection, one comes to find these women held back by seemingly unbreakable structures, dampening their power and bending them towards Western ideals. The result is a work in medias res: the Filipina as she unshackles herself from the existing modalities of Filipino identity.
One of the ongoing themes in my work is the reinterpretation of female archetypes in myth, literature and history. In mythology across cultures, women are are victimized or their characters are vilified. I seek to turn these tropes on their heads to imagine the Filipina prying agency from her oppressors and blossoming towards emancipation.
Registered as Goldieland Studio / New York, NY