Art Talks

Raw Nature and the Lady

What is a lady? A woman as defined by society and the civilised world? What about nature? That’s something that existed even before civilisation.  Perhaps these questions can find answers in the works of Katti Sta. Ana, Nova Hershey Mariposque and Ace San Miguel. Strikingly different in styles from each other, their works emanate the same unity of women with nature.  Sta. Ana’s ceramic sculptures of the orchid and sandals hybrid plays with imagery of the flower itself (or maybe the vulva also), and the object close to a woman’s fashionable sense of self – the footwear. Mariposque’s painting collages the images of other natural lifeforms to form a mainly anthropomorphic hybrid in vivid colours resulting to a mythical character. In contrast to these two modes of hybrids forms, Almansigue’s “Carmen” shows the fully clothed civilised nature of the woman figure separately formed from the other living things, yet showing engagement with each other. As the hybrid forms convey the outright belongingness of the woman with her primordial existence, the non-surreal scenario of the woman tending the garden grounds the wild nature without truly separating from it. If women as artists, are compelled to define the feminine through the forms of other living things and creatures, it is then undeniable that the “lady” is not a tamed being; rather, she is the life-force itself whose flow directs the order.