Marionne Contreras from the Philippines undertook a 1-month residency at Rimbun Dahan in November 2023, delving into botanical printing of plants foraged from the garden, in an act of remembering her hometown, retracing her lineage, and necessarily failing to replicate the beauty of nature.
About the Artist
Marionne Contreras (b. 1992) is a visual artist based in Manila, Philippines, with a current emphasis on fiber and fabric based works. Her works are diaristic, often with themes of memory, its persistence, its purity, and its vulnerability to tampering, with constant undertones of womanhood, consistently taking the role of the female as narrator; taking visual inspiration from textures and forms found in nature while maintaining an aesthetic that leans towards the synthetic.
Highly aware of the universality of the personal, her works often carry intimate personal narratives despite her conscious decision to highlight their ornamental nature – to always stage them as a tableau of beauty given the parameters in which the very idea of “the beautiful” is meant to work.
She has been actively exhibiting in The Philippines. Her most recent one-person exhibition, Poetry has left me, has just concluded last 10 November 2023 in Vinyl On Vinyl Gallery, Makati City, Philippines.
About the Residency
“I delved into botanical printing as a personal way to reconnect with my hometown. Printing plants from my mother’s garden and the wild flora along the river near my childhood home. Foraging for plants to print has become a personal ritual of reconnection with the sublime that gives all life, negating the self-importance of being human with the power to dominate, and affirming the beauty and sacredness in the futility of our existence among the multitude in the grand order of life. This particular sentiment is characteristic of the concepts that weave through my art practice, where I see nature as the ultimate source of everything that is beautiful, and where my efforts as an artist to capture and replicate that beauty eventually fail, for I am limited – what I produce is an ‘almost’ of the ideal, but that ‘almost’ can be enough.
“During my one-month stay in Rimbun Dahan, I foraged for plants to print in a place both familiar and somehow strange. I sought to trace the family of my reliable “printers” back at home, experimenting with various botanical printing approaches combined with techniques borrowed from traditional fabric dyeing. The act of tracing lineage, coupled with calculated intervention, mirrors my recent struggle with the legal documentation of my identity, which is explored in a number of textile works I created from the printed fabrics I produced, employing patchwork, quilting, and embroidery techniques
“To labor on the fabric I will make a final work from, which in itself, demands more labor, a final work that would be initially seen for its aesthetic value rather than its narrative is a very close parallel to the futility of human endeavor.”
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