Memories Reenacted began during COVID confinement in Manila, when travel and movement were no longer possible and images became a way of getting somewhere else. A kingfisher glimpsed on a walk through a park in BGC (Manila) became one starting point; childhood photographs from Narsarsuaq, in southern Greenland, became another. The paintings are an attempt to travel through these images rather than simply depict them — reinterpreting a remembered or photographed moment as abstract form, rather than illustrating it directly.
Each painting is built from three layers. The subject itself sits underneath, deconstructed into rock-like shapes — a way of holding on to the memory’s core form without literal representation. Over this runs a layer of tracks or veins, tracing movement and connection through the composition. On top sit what I call “masks” — an organic element that both covers and ties the other layers together, obscuring as much as it reveals.
The series sits at the intersection of memory and confinement: images as a substitute for travel, and travel as a way of thinking, even when the body can’t move.
