DIVERS, 2022
Photo: Daniel Terna, courtesy Someday NY
Someday, New York, November 4 - December 17, 2022
https://somedaygallery.com/
Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, July 8 - August 19, 2023
Organized by Peter Brock and presented by Someday
Museum of Arts and Design, New York, June 1, 2024 - ongoing
Craft Front & Center, exhibition series featuring work from the permanent collection and recent acquisitions
https://madmuseum.org/exhibition/craft-front-center-1
I am a deep diver into history; I search for links that connect my personal experience with collective and ancestral histories spanning time and place. I am on the lookout for form, even fragments. I search for evidence of my connection to others and wider sense of belonging within the world and within history. I use intuition, research, knowledge, memory, and imagination to identify objects, source materials, and things that enable me to elucidate the past in the present with unexpected complexity.
Although I was initially drawn to the reliquaries in the Medieval galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I became fascinated by the jewelry. I returned frequently to examine a strand of memento mori prayer beads carved in ivory. It was a devotional object, but not strictly a rosary. (A 2017 publication, The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe, refers to the object as a chaplet from France or southern Netherlands, ca. 1520-1540 – different in origin and date from the Met caption.) The beads are double-sided cameo relief portraits of fashionable aristocrats set within silver mounts that resemble fruit-laden garlands. Several of the beads are ‘death ivories’ – when flipped over, a skeleton appears in place of the sitter. The two end beads each resemble a bifurcated head of a skull and a cadaver, not unlike an anatomy model. Similar objects had a second life as curiosities in Kunstkammer collections that brought together scientific instruments, antiquarian objects, and exotic specimens. I was interested in the object’s connection to an early period of colonization and global trade, and sought to contend with its form: interlinked profile plaques in high relief. I thought about commemoration, memorials, medallions, cameo jewelry, funerary objects, and architectural decoration, and wanted to challenge assumptions about idealization and who might be worthy of depiction through relief portraiture.
During my fellowship at the Museum of Arts and Design, I began hand-sculpting replicas of different beads at jumbo size: 23 inches in length instead of the original two inches. Initially using myself as the model, I sculpted each portrait until I could sense a resemblance to family members, including my mother (Diver I) and aunt (Diver III). I used plasticine, an oil-based clay unsuitable for exhibition yet ideal for mold making. I took the unconventional approach of sculpting a second time inside the mold, shaping and pressing stoneware clay directly with my hands so that each casting would appear unique. By working against the rigidity of the mold, I could gouge and tear the clay while maintaining structural integrity and an overall hollow shape by using an interior clay scaffolding. The substructure had a cage-like appearance, evoking lattice and ironwork, as well as something natural, like a wasp nest. I also sculpted one of the skeleton busts, closely following the referent (along with its strange anatomy). The dark humor appealed to me, as well as the morbid aesthetics typical of the genre. When the sculptures were finished and mounted vertically, they resonated differently, resembling amulets, talismans, ancestral portraits, or masks. Diver I is comprised of five parts held in place by a single mount, suggestive of excavation, archaeology, and a surface worn and weathered by time. The rifts, gaps, dissections, and cuts are emblematic of my interpretation of a fragmented past.
I identify as a diver who ventures into the depths of the past, but the title of the series originated elsewhere. When I encountered the prayer beads at the Met, I thought about mission churches and objects of piety such as the rosary, set against histories of devastation. I also thought about my family’s entanglement with histories of colonization in the Pacific region, the Catholic mission schools three generations of my family attended in Hawai`i, the pink plastic rosary I purchased for one dollar from Sister Maria Cordis, and the sugar plantations owned by missionary descendants, where my relatives did field work. The color of the ivory reminded me of dead or bleached coral, and I remembered mission churches that were constructed from coral slabs hewn from underwater reefs, including the oldest and largest church in Honolulu, where I was raised, and in the Philippines and Indonesia. I thought about the extreme labor required to build these coral churches, including freediving, hand-chiseling, and hauling massive blocks of the living organism out from the ocean with chain and rope. I have discovered that ruins are part of who I am, connecting me to sediments and layers of history.