Sculptured pots, sculpted plants

It is always refreshing to see exhibits within the formal gallery setting that expand the conventional notion of art, if not pull away from the usual wallbound pieces that seek to marry painting and sculpture. It is even a more uplifting experience to view ordinary things bathed in gallery lights such that when accorded timely consideration and reflection and with minimal intervention from the artist, the transformation assumes the proportion of a serious art venture.

In Pasnim, due to open tomorrow, March 5, at the Crucible Gallery at SM Megamall, there are no paintings and sculptures to view. In their stead are sculptured pots and sculpted plants done by Liwa, a young artist on her way to establish herself as a sculptor using marble from Romblon as her chief material. The exhibition title is derived from the contraction of two terms – paso and tanim, or pots and plants.

Making use of ready-made marble mortars into pots for plants, Liwa extends the ambit of an art product as a compendium of craft continuation and development where her hands overlap the hands of the anonymous craft artist. In visioning sculptured pots from mortars, Liwa elevates the banality of everyday utensils into objects of personal interest and passion, ergo, art.

Today’s society is characterized by a highly consumerist lifestyle. As a practice, consumers tend to devour products purely from how they are presented or defined by the packaging that usually accompany them. The bombardment of these instructionals has stunted the user’s innate capability to innovate on them.

What Liwa wants to emphasize through the exhibition is that the habit of consuming can be happily matched with the habit of imbuing the enterprise with a modicum of imagination. In Pasnim, Liwa achieves a balance of nature in the scale of personal awareness and home environment.

Liwa works around the pre-determined form of the mortar, or the almirez. With the ingenious use of acrylic, she paints the mortar's walls with suggestions of waves and water and of the morning and evening skies. She then applies a coating of silicon-based water sealant for durability and lasting shelf life.

Holes were carved out of the pots to enhance the space around and within the plants they may contain. At the same time, they prevent the retention of water in the crevices of the plants, which, experience shows, leads to rotting. While some of the pots retain the whiteness of the marble, others exhibit colors to fulfill both decorative and protective functions.

Liwa lives in a house with no adjacent walls having the same color. Waking up to around 50 different colors every day has certainly broadened her spectrum of what should and should not have color. In applying layers upon layers of pigment, Liwa considers the effect of colors in affecting people’s moods. Culture, on another plane, predefines appropriateness and inappropriateness of colors. There are colors perceived to be happy, and there are colors associated with the exact opposite.

Planted in the pots are sculpted miniaturized trees called bansoy, another contraction of the vernacular phrase bansot na halamang makahoy. Liwa, who studied biology at the University of the Philippines, conducts seminars for the propagation and development of bansoy, both a process and a philosophy in miniaturizing trees in the Philippine context. The punctured holes on the mortar’s walls fulfill another pragmatic function as easy anchors for wires to tie the bansoy in its early stage while in the process of being sculpted.

A total of 33 pots make up the exhibit. Only 15 feature the bansoy, viewed at a given time, and changed every three days to allow for the natural sustenance of sunlight and water the plants so require. This way, the exhibit assumes a very dynamic point of view. A non-static show, it changes every three days throughout its two-week run.

Through the exhibit, Liwa advocates the practice of bansoy growing mainly because it espouses a philosophy of design that reflects Filipino culture and tradition, while it keeps fidelity with the condition of trees in our own natural clime.

Although her entry course in UP was BS Biology, Liwa finished a BS in Family Life and Child Development in 1998. Her training has immensely aided her in crafting wooden toys and installation sculpture for children. When not making art, she engages herself in pre-school teaching using the integrated core curriculum.

An exhibiting artist since 1996, Liwa has participated in numerous group shows held at the SM Artwalk, the UP Vargas Museum, the Alliance Française, the GSIS Museo ng Sining, and the Metropolitan Museum of Manila.

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For comments, send e-mail to ruben_david.defeo@up.edu.ph.