Growing up in the shadows of whiteness, colonization, and assimilation, I realized I don’t know much about my material familial histories. The work I am producing is coming from the desire to know more.  My studio practice has become the act of wanting to discover, engaging in a creative-fictional mode that builds the bridge to my Filipino ancestry.  In asking myself what my intentions are, asking my mother for information, and dreaming of what her hometown is like, it becomes more about the information and potentials.  Given my material family growing up in poverty, our motherland being colonized many times over, and various familial migrations, there is no familial archive I can turn to and all I know is what my mother is willing to share. I’ve begun using fiction to gesture towards desires I have- my desire to see and know my ancestral islands, my desire to honor ancestors who may or may not have existed, my desire as a commitment or force to simply know.

My current body of work addresses how fiction, abstraction, and alchemy work together to manifest missing links of an untold familial history as it relates to my queer, trans personal history.  Through ceramics, I found my forms becoming volcanic, cavernous, and mountainous with glazes melting, oozing, and cascading off my objects.  Much of my work emulates the landscapes, flora, and fauna of various ancestral archipelagos, such as the Philippines, Hawaii and the Scottish Orkney Islands.  While my work has been a continuous experiment in form, color, and alchemy, it became a place for me to contemplate my Asian heritage and the disconnect I had felt from it.  The work serves as both a means to dream up endless possibilities, and an offering to honor ancestors across different temporalitie.