Haptic, tacit,
semi-precious: 

new works
by Sherry Quiambao 

By Aimee Dodds

An emergency thermal blanket (sold under names
including survival blanket, space blanket, or accident blanket) is made
terrestrial; hewn like a nugget of semi-precious mineral from an imaginary
land. I am struck by how much its silver gold crinkly patina recalls the cheap
foil insides of chocolate wrappers. 

The 1980s (or pre-1987, at least) is
often referred to as
‘WA’s golden age.’ 

***

A pair of shell-pink rubber gloves: empty and full
of air, two phantom hands holding space. A palm-leaf fan, (pamaypay) graspable
in one fist. A mini-fridge lined with cold metal aluminium cans of sweet mango
nectar for the unquenched to collect; a paper KFC bag, to scrunch and breathe
in and out of; a trophy to polish – for a winner’s display cabinet. A fruit, to
hold. A piece of a fruit, to eat. A bright yellow pencil to write and stab
fruit with. A tennis racquet. Veiled in a Golden Hue gives
us objects like riddles to solve. These items have been recast from their
need-based utility functions into a layered chorus of significance. Gently
offered to or for audiences, these things are now devoid of their
original purposes: to hit, to cover, to consume. They accumulate in Sherry
Quiambao’s choreographed spectacle of video, sculpture and photographic prints,
drawing us in to consider them anew.

 …the habituary, ordinary, mundane

A can of drink is spilled. Ritual offerings are
repacked and uncovered. The mess is cleaned up. 

The term ‘quotidian’ refers to the routines of
daily, or everyday life. Its theoretical polarities invoke a kind of
taken-for-granted-ness as well as a type of defamiliarisation (or making the
ordinary seem alien in art). Cultural theorist Rita Felski writes that
‘everyday life is the most self-evident, yet the most puzzling of ideas’.
Importantly, for Felski ‘the temporality of the everyday […] is that of repetition,
the spatial ordering of the everyday is anchored in a sense of home, and
the characteristic mode of experiencing the everyday is that of habit.’

This is Quiambao’s first major solo
exhibition in some time; developed out of a recent residency at Fremantle Arts
Centre. Her works point out the strangeness (Marx might say alienation),
interdependence and stranglehold between us and rampant late-stage consumer-capitalism.
Her constructions are often rather deceptive – visually delightful, vibrant,
quietly structured, friendly in their poise. Of course, something curious lurks
underneath. These clean-looking assemblages deny their own hidden processes of
making and becoming. The objects, as presented to us, conceal the acts of being
found, transported to, or represented in a gallery space, and the hours of work
done to make them just so. 

Quiambao transforms everyday items – pervasive,
unremarkable and discarded — into the unfamiliar, suggestive and aesthetically
compelling. Tessellations of pose and position, rotations, overlappings, tinted
colour backdrops, soft lighting washes – these are the final surface
engagements that come at the end of an un-straightforward timeline of
considered artistic labour, just before the photo is taken. 

Quiambao’s works ask us to consider how the process
of accumulating (stuff and things) might mean. That is to say, how
might objects from or of a life mean differently, or be charged –
particularly for those who have journeyed across oceans (or been pressured into
doing so) to call this country home. A Filipino/Australian who grew up in
regional WA during the 1980s, the lavish excesses of the ‘Golden Age’ leave
trace elements in Quiambao’s materials and aesthetics. The artist’s mother
emigrated to Australia from the Philippines in 1981, seeking independence,
financial security and freedom. Coming from poverty in Laguna, Philippines, she
found herself in the strange, isolated environment of Port
Hedland/Marapikurrinya, WA. Elements of dissonance, distance, and dislocation
resonate throughout these works – yet so does resilience, humour, and
peaceableness.  

***

Largely, regally… 

Golden, Longed… instead
stained. 

Pastel petals; plates. Solemn lemons & melons.
Cutlery cruelty. 

Idolise doilies…

Amenity anytime!

***

Jackfruit cuddles 

There’s someone that I know (not well, a friend of
a friend) who once posted a series of pictures online of her cuddling a
spiky-ridged, lime green jackfruit. The snaps were taken over several visits to
the shops. This person is a woman, mother, actress. When the jackfruit pictures
were suggested on my social feed, the woman was working interstate on a TV
show, away from her family and her child for weeks on end. This was during the
first wave of covid.

Peeking out from behind a broomstick in a print is
the artist’s daughter. Quiambao tells me that her daughter chose that movement
intuitively, without instructions. In Mother dreams on a stone,
an equally pathos-loaden print, the artist’s mother rests on the floor, her
head resting on a stone, one hand extended towards us into the foreground of
the image. Here, the crinkly chocolate-wrapper foil blanket gently covers her.
The scene is beautiful; careful shadows, her outstretched beckoning or offering
hand, her piercing eyes. The artist describes the scene to me as ‘like a sculptural arrangement including a
person.’ 

***

The excess of a regime. 

Imelda Marcos was the First Lady of the Philippines
from 1965 to 1986. Alongside her
husband, she stole billions of pesos from the poverty-stricken people of her
country. Imelda is well-known for having over 3000 pairs of shoes; shoes that
now reside in a public museum for public ogling. Allegedly, the real number of
shoes was closer to 1700, as revealed by a magazine last decade. Darkly
incomprehensible and staggering regardless – but oddly, no one has pointed out
that 1700 pairs (with two shoes in each) is more than 3000 individual
shoes. 

A sense of home 

Amongst vivid prints depicting alien-looking
flowers, bright fruits and sporting ephemera, Keana Mislang wears an
embellished terno (a traditional Filipino dress) that belonged to the
artist’s mother. She is holding an Anthurium
flower. Anthuriums are favoured domestic items –
houseplants – toxic to both pets and kids. The chemical compound calcium
oxalate is the main culprit; this same compound causes a majority of kidney
stones, which commonly occur in diets containing highly processed or ‘junk’
foods.

What is kept, what is treasured, replaced,
discarded…

The varied sizes of the printed works plus the
personal touches present in cultural objects from Quiambao’s life give a
touching register to this exhibition. Many viewers will relate to the
generational narrative of migration and its emotional resonances, if from their
own cultural backgrounds. Quiambao reconsiders the magnitudes that
otherwise-ignorable quotidian objects can accumulate in our emotions and
memories: it matters here but not there, this one is fraught, this one
happy. 

A poem, a mope. 

Objects, like words, can retune our attention to
that which is not immediately decipherable, or haptic – despite of course, that
the main function of language is that it is theoretically
able-to-be-understood by an other. Within each fullstopped sentence
in the above collage-poem ‘Largely, regally…’  the words are
anagrams of their siblings. They mean only in connection with each
other, and when tethered to visual elements in Quiambao’s works: the colour
gold, the quality of longing, the domestic shapes and objects contained
(cutlery, plates, melons) and their suggestions of home, habit. Some are
irreverently intentioned (idolise doilies, amenity anytime) pointing out
consumer-culture’s latent strangeness. This tacit register operates somewhat
akin to Quiambao’s works – but her artistry embeds us on a far larger scale, a
visual one, of time, colour, shape. We may know of all the letters, but the
arrangement accumulates a new kind of significance. Let us grasp it.