I paint imagined scenes caught at the cusp of transformation. Through curls, folds, tears and cuts, I manipulate paper and clay to create landscapes that mirror my personal experience. Painting allows me to locate myself as I constantly move back and forth  between the Philippines and the United States.

Working with carefully mediated marks in colored pencil and oil pastel over spontaneous splashes of ink, I play with textures and sheen to enhance the synergy between the cultures I maneuver in. I employ paper made from natural and synthetic pulp to explore the contrast between absorption and a resistant surface— further asking what aspects of a place or identity I internalize, and what simply passes through me.

I look to the flora and fauna I encounter on my daily walks as formal guides- observing how they adapt to their environment for survival. Deckled and torn edges echo natural borders. Vibrant and saturated colors lure and warn – similar to how color serves different purposes for a flower or a poisonous frog. 

Furthermore, photographs of me holding the paintings invite complications in how hybrid identities assert themselves within a place. Hyphenated labels like Filipino-American have always felt inadequate. Working in abstraction allows me to move beyond categories—to invite complications and conversations rather than a search for answers and uniformity. 

Each surface accepts that it can never be the same again – canvas is stained, paper is torn, clay is fired. The works assert impermanence and transformation as necessary states of becoming.

Artist Bio

Alternately living between Manila, Philippines and Houston, Texas for the past decade informs Pamintuan’s practice as she cultivates and maps out her own space in this in-between. Departing from natural forms, her paintings and ceramic pieces explore one’s capability to adapt through the eyes of flora or fauna. Through layers that encourage conversation between intuitive mark making and mediated strokes, she probes at the visual possibilities of slowing down movement, suspending time, and elongating moments. In 2018, she graduated magna cum laude from the University of the Philippines Diliman with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting. Since then, she has exhibited in various galleries in Metro Manila, Studio 9D in New York City,  and at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. Pamintuan is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Visual Arts at Cornell University.