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By Perry Gil S. Mallari
PAZ “CHING” ABAD SANTOS has always taken the
road less traveled. The past three decades of this extraordinary
artist has been dedicated to the pursuit of fiber art, a relatively
new discipline in the realm of fine arts that is not only demanding
esthetically but physically as well. Filipino fiber artists of today
owe a lot to Abad Santos, whose exemplary works have allowed fiber
art to gain respectability in the local art scene.
In the last few years, the prolific artist
highlights the therapeutic and utilitarian function of her art by
unveiling Fabric of Life… Series to Infinity, her innovative
invention that allows the blind to detect colors and create their
own artworks.
Worth the wait
Born in 1943, Abad Santos has a solid Catholic
upbringing, completing her primary and tertiary education at the
Assumption Convent, an exclusive school for the girls. At 18, she
got married to an architect and opted to be a full-time housewife
and mother. During this period, Abad Santos only managed to attend
to her art intermittently churning out works in watercolor and
intaglio, and completing short courses in Chinese painting and
interior design.
It took 18 years before she was able to study
art on a full-time basis. “I knew early on that art requires total
commitment,” she says, recalling her decision to put art in the
backburner when she prioritized the homefront. Abad Santos recalls
that she already had a clear-cut objective in mind from the time she
enrolled at the University of the Philippines-Diliman in 1979. “My
goal is to study what Philippine art really was,” she stresses. In
1981, she earned her degree in fine arts graduating magna cum laude.
It was a testament to Abad Santos’ high level
of artistic skill that she caught the attention of the local art
scene while still a fine art student at the University of the
Philippines. No mean feat for a newcomer whose chosen medium—fiber
art—was considered a new genre then. She had made a first and
lasting impression with Strands, her initial offering of fiber art
in 1980 that employed thread and burlap as primary materials. In
that same year, she won the gold medal in the painting category of
the 33rd Annual Competition of the Art Association of the
Philippines. Two years later, in 1982, Abad Santos bagged the
prestigious Mobil Art Award that propelled the beginning of an
illustrious career. For the next two decades, she continued to reap
accolades and recognition as an artist both in the Philippines and
abroad.
Ethnic esthetics
Abad Santos’ artistic direction through the
years was mainly guided by her desire to unravel the native
esthetics of her country. “I believe that fiber art and my use of
indigenous materials are very much aligned with our national
identity,” she points out. Abad Santos first finds great
inspiration in the t’nalak, a cloth made of abaca fiber that is
the traditional art of the T’boli tribe of North Cotabato. She
coined her first T-boli inspired series T’nalak Evolution, which
was exhibited in 1982 and 1983.
Rigor is an element perpetually present in all
of Abad Santos creations. Her pieces exhibit not only superb spatial
judgment but also the skill and strength of her hands in doing such
a tedious manual task, something not typical of a woman of her
bearing. Unlike artists who work with conventional materials like
oils and watercolors and who create imagery through a stroke of a
brush, Abad Santos creates her oeuvre by vigorously weaving,
knotting and stitching tough materials like fibers and found
objects. She explains that though her art displays the qualities of
a tapestry, a painting and an assemblage, it is categorically
neither of the three, “I just call it my art,” she
philosophically intones.
Rigorous research
In the late eighties and early nineties, after
nearly a decade of immersion in the t’nalak art of the T’bolis,
Abad Santos began integrating into her art the components of the
Maranao okir, a system of curvilinear designs applied to the
tribe’s carvings, mat weaving and textile. Three popular Maranao
decorative motifs are the sari-manok (legendary bird with fish), the
naga (serpent) and the pako rabong (growing fern). Among the most
notable works of Abad Santos during this period was the Okir-a-Datul
Okir-a-Bai, a huge tapestry-curtain measuring 751.84 cm x 617.22 cm
with back-to-back designs.
Abad Santos’ nearly three decades of toil in
fiber art did not come without a cost. Her hands, in contrast to her
regal deportment, have roughen through the years of enduring manual
strain. Her choice of material has also proven to be unforgiving.
The fibers Abad Santos loved to work on have accumulated on the
walls of her airway, now prompting her to wear a mask every time she
works on a project. She had also developed sensitivity to resin
fumes. But all these have hardly made a dent on the artist’s verve
for life and prolificacy. With artistic energy that would be an envy
of artists half her age, Abad Santos aims to draw artistic
inspiration from the Northern Luzon highlands specifically the rich
textile and carving traditions of the Kalinga and Ifugao tribes.
Form and function
Abad Santos as an artist is not content on just
producing esthetically pleasing forms. As far as she is concerned,
art must serve an active function as well. Abad Santos reveals that
for many years now, she is harnessing the healing capabilities of
art by conducting art therapy workshops to individuals with varying
degrees of infirmities. Some of Abad Santos’ works for instance
are included in the collection of St. Luke’s Hospital in Quezon
City for the supposed subliminal healing these artworks radiate to
viewers.
It was on this line of thought that she created
Fabric of Life… Series to Infinity.
Though having employed her art in various
therapeutic endeavors in the past, Abad Santos reveals that she
hasn’t accomplished anything of exemplary significance for the
blind. And so, she toiled on creating a system where the blind can
experience the joy of creating art, the very core of her existence.
Abad Santos indeed was bent on sharing to the visually impaired the
bliss that artists like her experience. The backbone of her
invention is a system dubbed as “strand.” It allows the blind to
identify a particular color or hue by feeling the number and spacing
of strands affixed to painted cardboard tiles. The said tiles
evolved from thousands of prototypes she created based on her fabric
and tapestry designs. Having mastered the codes of the strands, a
blind person can create his own composition by pasting and
juxtaposing the tiles of his choice in a special Velcro board.
Testing time
Twenty-year-old Rachelle Pilares has been blind
since the age of five and she has already tested Abad Santos’
invention effective. Pilares learned the basic usage of the
invention in a matter of minutes and in two hours, she was already
displaying a high degree of proficiency. Four months after her
introduction to Fabric of Life… she was actively creating her own
compositions. A number of Pilares’ works are on display at Abad
Santos’s studio in Quezon City. Though giving special focus to the
blind, the artist explains that her invention will prove beneficial
to anyone seeking repose and healing from art describing it as
multidimensional in nature. When asked if she already applied for a
patent for her invention, Abad Santos says she already did in 2006,
though she laments that the bureaucratic process she had gone
through was daunting.
Reclusive by nature, she is quite uncomfortable
with the media attention she’s now getting because of her
invention intoning that she is plainly happy with her art. “I am
thankful that I have the freedom to create and do what I want,”
she adds.
Strand, the one element omnipresent in all of
Abad Santos’ creations represents her philosophy as an artist and
as an individual. She discloses that she once had a meditation
watching a strand tied on an end of a high pole being buffeted by
the wind. The humble yarn brought a sort of epiphany that she
articulated with the following cryptic words… “In whatever way
the wind may blow, a strand will lead the way. . . that has been my
life with the strands, the “telltale.”
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