2021

The model for this piece is a friend of mine whom I admire for her bravery, intellect and activism. She came her from the Philippines as a young girl to escape possible ill-fate and is a breast cancer survivor. I decided to depict her as a Babaylan, a Filipino “Shaman,” or healer (almost exclusively women). Here, she is, in modern dress, summoning ancestral spirits from the Manunggul jar (a Neolithic, ancestral burial jar) to quell a catastrophic typhoon (Haiyan, 2013). While this piece is, of course, fantastical, the rising tide at her feet symbolizes the threat of global warming to island nations, which is all too real.