Life Unravelled Stitch by Stitch

5 Filipino artists who probe the intricacies of life through textile.

Written by Chesca Santiago
September 30, 2023

Across a long history of materials and techniques, textile has been intertwined tightly with Philippine creative life. Abaca, cotton, piña, and more have been skillfully woven into textiles that have been utilized by Filipinos for centuries—as meticulously loomed garb of indigenous communities, as finely embroidered tapestry that adorns our homes.

Textile is a material as pliable as it is sturdy, an enduring companion for a range of creative intentions then and now. In the country’s contemporary art scene, Filipino artists have unfolded textile as installations, tapestries, canvas works, and other formats that render it a medium of possibilities.

With their social-artistic commitments that reach beyond the seams, what emerges from the woven thread is more than just a material to be hung, worn, or draped. Explore a life unraveled for all its complexities—its violence and aspirations included—with these five Filipino artists who probe life through textile, stitch by stitch.

Olivia d'Aboville

Blues by Olivia d'Aboville, made with Philippine silk cut, layered, and embroidered on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.

French-Filipino artist and designer Olivia d'Aboville has a longstanding affinity with materials. Based in Manila, d'Aboville first gained recognition for her works that transform waste and plastic in her commitment towards maritime environmental protection. Among her most well-known works is the 90 Giant Dandelions, a PET bottle installation that has toured across Europe and Asia.

The ocean still constitutes d'Aboville’s artistic language today. Only this time, her experimentations have turned to silk, piña, polyester, and abaca as their primary fabric. Pleated, dyed or painted, then handwoven into canvas, the textile on d'Aboville’s oeuvre distills the fluidity of the ocean through line, color, and texture. Whether through the grace of her silk experiments or the intensity of her abaca folds, d'Aboville’s creative devotion to the ocean remains.

Cian Dayrit

From Cian Dayrit’s Frontiers of Struggle series, portraying the Sagay massacres in Negros island in 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.

Multimedia artist Cian Dayrit has worked with painting, sculpture, and installation. But as artist and activist, Dayrit’s resistance to structures of power is best articulated through his textile works. He creates his own tapestries of maps, emblems, seals, and flags in an act to subvert and eventually reclaim dominant political tools and institutions.

Dayrit’s tapestries are often cartographic in nature. A practice necessarily anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, and anti-feudal, he maps out landscapes of injustice: spatial reckonings of the agrarian revolution, neoliberal development, militarization, and other schemes of state-perpetrated violence. Rich in meaning and intent, Dayrit’s tapestries are read as maps where justice is sewn and embroidered on mountains, fields, and frontiers.

Aze Ong

Aze Ong’s Detachment (Yin Figure) staticly moving through the gallery space. Image courtesy of the artist.

The seeds of Aze Ong’s practice started early in her youth, when, as a child, she would help out in her family’s textile business. Today, Ong works primarily with fiber: crocheting, knitting, and creating macrame installations “borne of the exact moment they are made,” as in the words of Francisco Lee. Organic, often amoebous in form, and at times intersecting with her ceramics and performance art ventures. Although static as they hang from the ceiling or wall, they pulsate in space with movement to expand and reach out with a life of its own.

This tendency towards life informs the core of Ong’s practice. Connecting—with the self and with space, whether in method or intent—is her modus operandi. Approached by Ong through the metaphors of light and healing culled from her meditations, what emerges is a process of life-making made by joining one fiber to another, patiently.

Tekla Tamoria

Tekla Tamoria’s Pagdungaw takes its cue from John Everett Millais’ Ophelia. Image courtesy of Tekla Tamoria.

The former graphic designer began her foray into the contemporary art scene with paper. Through origami, Tekla Tamoria folded cartolina, lottery tickets, colored paper, and other paper materials into clothing and installations. These are drawn largely from spontaneous meditations of her day-to-day: while taking care of her mother, while riding the MRT, while gazing at the furniture inside her home.

Today, she has added textile to her repertoire, in turn cementing experimentation as the core of her practice. While some themes, such as life, death, and femininity recur, exploration of her chosen material forms Tamoria’s primary intent. Multi-fabric tapestries, fabric egg trays, fabric bisugo sewn on a bilao—works that resist labels so long as they stretch the possibilities of the medium.

Pacita Abad

Often massive in scale, Pacita Abad’s textile works are sewn from a life in diaspora. Image courtesy of the Pacita Abad Website.

Born in Basco, Batanes, Pacita Abad’s prolific 30-year career was deeply influenced by her travels. During the Marcos regime, political violence would force the student activist to finish her studies in Spain in 1969, signaling the beginning of a highly itinerant career that would span the entire globe.

As she set up studios in Jakarta, Singapore, Boston, Chicago, Dhaka, Bangkok, and New York, Abad lugged not just her paintings, but her artistic inspirations drawn from her life in diaspora. Best known among her works are her oft-massive trapunto paintings: stuffed mixed-media canvases hand-stitched with textile, sequins, ribbons, shells, mirrors and other materials collected from her travels. Abad’s canvases are markers of a life lived vividly from continent to continent.