Artist Statement
I make oil paintings that layer portrait, textiles, patterns, maps, and other cultural artifacts from my life, and personal history. My process begins with collecting vintage family photos, as well as frequently capturing new ones of my own. I gather patterns: from textiles, in my parents’ home, from old clothing, wallpaper, memory, and nature. I research maps of places that have been important in my life or in my history. I take all these elements, and then I start to draw and paint, without a clear vision of the outcome, allowing the process to inform how the layers interact, which come to the fore or are obscured underneath.
I am interested in the experiences, places, and relationships that compound to form my identity as an individual, yet also bind me to certain communities, groups, and locations – in my mind, and in the eyes of others. I am curious about how visual and social clues can provide a sense of belonging while simultaneously (necessarily?) lending to exclusion or otherness.
I am a woman, a mother, a Filipino American, a wife in a mixed race marriage and raising mixed race children, a child of immigrants, raised Catholic, lived most of my life in the American south, a traveler, a feminist, an artist. I was born into some of these identities, and some I chose. I am curious about the alchemy of nature AND nurture, learned and assumed, how I see myself and how others perceive me. What is intrinsic, and what is acquired.
When I was a child, I believed that everything in the world had a meaning or reason behind it; the birds in the living room wallpaper, the pattern of grooves in my sneakers, order of prayers in mass, were all significant of something I did not know yet, that growing up would be a process of learning the hidden codes that adults were privy to. Like the Dewey decimal card files, there was a systematic organization that once learned, would unlock all the mysteries of the world. I’ve come to realize that I was right and wrong. Sometimes events unfold, or things are designed thoughtfully and according to historical precedent. Sometimes there is intention behind choices that we are not meant to suspect or decipher. Sometimes what seems planned is actually random. There is both calculation and chaos at work at once.