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 of Asian women and engages with my expression of femininity as a Filipina in the Western world. In reinterpreting narratives and myths from the Philippines, I seek to heal a great wound of cultural loss. 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.
Motivated by the longstanding intimacies of my culture to nature, I explore how plants and flowers from developing countries are appropriated through trade. Drawing from metaphor, myth and histories, I see in these flowers a metaphor for the Filipina woman—a colonized, commodified and exoticized body.
One of the ongoing themes in my work is the reinterpretation of these female archetypes. In mythology across cultures, women's bodies are transformed into plants as punishment for acting on their desires. I seek to turn these myths on their heads to imagine the Filipina prying agency from her oppressors and blossoming towards emancipation.