Oh my word. So, beautiful! Born in the Philippines, Marigold Santos now calls both Calgary and Montreal home. I couldn’t decide if I should write about her dreamy acrylic paintings, or her haunting ink on paper works… luckily for me, Marigold often hangs them together, so I will too! This description is from her 2018 show, titled “in this drought, flood my hollow heart”, at Galerie D’Este in Montreal:

“Recent works of Marigold Santos continue to examine the ongoing theme of empowered selfhoods through embracing fragmentation and multiplicity of personal identity, informed by lived experience and impressed upon our landscapes, real or imagined.

In this exhibition, the emotional landscape is personified by drafting together memories and traversed physical landscapes to create a collage of meaning and experience. 

Geological forms, objects, and foliage become the characters within these surreal landscapes. Through anthropomorphisation, they embody the projection of emotionality and function as surrogates for the absent body. Layered and collaged imagery creates an expression of specific moments; interior and exterior vignettes that, through a reflection of space and surroundings, invite contemplation and awareness.

Evoking hours of transitioning light, quiet and stillness provide the setting for meditations that comfortably hover in the gradient. As enduring time pushes mountain, carves rock, and highlights the slow yet persistent growth of arid plant life, the absent figure records memories that are edited together to create new narratives. Love lost, love gained, isolation, solitude, melancholy, depression, vulnerability and courage.” 

{via Pennylane Shen – on the podcast a few weeks ago}