Nouns are verbs (Philippine birds)

Awagami corn and indigo leaf paper, poem, angled wooden frame (three diptychs)

2023

Following Book for birds — an earlier work that combined two materials: seeded paper and writing materialized in holes — this series explores this process and material combination further. 

The poem dispersed in the three diptychs is composed of selected dictionary definitions of verbs found in the common names of Philippine birds both endemic and rare/accidental (e.g. Crested Myna, Benguet Bush Warbler, Eurasian Skylark). Philippine birds touches on imaginations of Adam naming all creatures, the scientific practices of taxonomy and ethology,  and millenia of evolution, domestication, migration, and extinction.

Anchored on the idea of language, translation, and poetry as human inventions and interventions in relation to understandings of ‘the natural world’, the work considers ways humans connect to/make known and distance themselves from/mystify other forms of life through established systems of knowledge.

Nothing human is alien to me
Group exhibition curated by Carlos Quijon, Jr.
A+ Works of Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
12 Aug - 23 Sept 2023

Documentation photos courtesy of Kenta Chai and A+ Works of Art