The impulse is to fabricate and the subject of fascination is apperance. Maker of clothers and visual artist, Patricia Eustaquio finds herself in a unique position to spin the narratives of adornment and vanity, at the crossroads between still life and the interior, schemes that have preoccupied her mind and hand. This multifaceted talent, which is quite rare among contemporary artists in the Philippines so absorbed either in skill or worn-out conceptual masquerades, leads her to calibrate a language that articulates insights into both craft and embodiment, the process of making and the performance of taking on habits. This disposition could be discerned early on where for her thesis in the university, she made canvas shoes, wore them, walked around the city leisurely and aimlessly, and presented the peripatetic inscriptions on the soles, imprints of which she also painted.

Craft here pertains to fabric, leather, ceramic, crochet, and upholstery, within the range of the homespun and the industrial. And embodiment gestures toward fashion, a film noir narrative of a violence or crime, and poetry written in neon. Here the sensibility is nostalgic, loking back at fragments of memory, totems, reminders of her kin, specifically her grandmother whose annotation in one of her photographs the artist would quote and include in the painting of the memento: "They stood right un front of my only blooming shrub & hid the flowers. This nostalgia runs through cast of shoes, embroidery on a found ironing board, recipes and chocolate cake served on opening night, painting that captures moment of demise like a dead pheasant or a pig slaughtered and the blood blooms and permeates the canvas."

Vanity is not incidental in thsi situation; rather, it is central. It foregrounds teh furniture of culture and the architecture of personal memory: intricate and dense crochet imitating a chair; a faux piano encased in carved leather; and Dutch still life repainted on shaped canvas. In these flashes of objects scattered across a room, we glean the choreography of presence, but one that treads in shifting ground because the manifestation is so contrived and therefore so insecure of its survival as image. This is why the trope of the still life and the interior is salient: it portrays the production of property, its worldliness, on the one hand, and the ephemeral nature of things, on the other. The inclusio of game, or hunted animals, in painting and drapery in domestic fixtures speaks of this possibility of vanishing. Having said that, the tableau is also exceptionally "contemporary" and "present" because it indexes quotidian economy, its "pop" culture in a manner of speaking, and the object leap out of the frame to engage the otherwise passive consumer of commodities.

This is most telling in her first one-person exhibition Split Seam Stress (2003) in which she installs in the gallery paintings of clothers, clothes in the closet, and actual clothes made up of assorted vintage pieces. The latter may reference the surplus stories in tropical countries where winter accoutrements are sold all-year round. In Swine (2004), this takes on an edgier dimension as the project becomes fully installative, with the space transformed into a scene of an interior: a chair, a refrigerator, a painting, and a peculiar wall piece that conjures a duck sewn in all sheerness. In another foray, she would interact with the memorabilia of a Filipino collector-politicial who collaborated with the Japanese pupper government in the Philippines during the Pacific War.

Eustaquio romances an artisanal effect in many of her projects, finding affection in marginalized forms or the so-called miinor arts that privilege decoration as an aesthetic culmination. She explored the nuances of this mentality in Death to the Major, Viva Minor (2008), inspired by Bach's canonical The Well-Tempered Clavier, a template for harmonies in western tonal music. This resonates with the ceramic work Arteria Axilliaris (2008), a dissected arm in the mode of anatomical study that is a violin, still well within an examination of the fetish for the folly of perfect measure: body, music, art. Eustaquio's predilection as a designer of clothers is important in understanding her calling because it crosses the gaps between a feminine everyday life and an ethical zone in the art world that takes issue with the virtue of rationality, conceptualism, and indifference to hand-made, time-consuming, labor-intensive things. It also nudges her closer to the source of fabric's wonder: motif, pattern, repetition, and the meditative quality of painting through the grid and the thin brush. Her current interest in ceramics should take her to more unchartered trails in this intersection between the daily and the deliberate as she paints, installs, designs for film, theater, dance and dresses up intrepid fashionistas and daring brides.

Words by Patrick D. Flores

Patrick D. Flores is a professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, a curator and currently the Director of the Vargas Museum (Quezon City, Philippines).

Patricia Perez Eustaquio studied World Cultures in Trieste, Italy and pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting (Magna cum Laude) at the University of the Philippines.

Eustaquio works in a variety of media in both painting and sculpture, pushing both forms into the realm of craft and design. Her works explore the vanity of such constructs, citing histories and processes related to different materials by crafting highly decorative objects and then deliberately shaving off their parts to create the stark contrasts of what is present vs. the absent, arriving at the finished albeit nuanced form. Her paintings depict magnified details of still lifes, transforming them into ornately shaped, large canvasses. Her ghost forms constructed out of handmade lace are shrouds that take on the form of their former selves, so that a chair appears only as its shell and nothing more. Of this series, Eustaquio's Psychogenic Fugue, a scupture in crocheted lace of a ghost piano, was included in th exhibit Popping Up at the Hong Kong Art Centre in 2010 alongside artists Michael Lin, Toyo Ito and other established Asian artists. It was also included in Credit Suisse's Chimera show at the Singapore Art Museum in 2012.

Patricia is a Thirteen Artists' Award recipient. It is an award given to Filipino artists below 40 years of age by the National Commission, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, every three to four years. She is also the winner of the Ateneo Art Awards in 2009, and part of its shortlists for 2010 and 2012. Her work has been exhibited in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, New York, and Basel, and her work is part of the Singapore Art Museum collection and private collections in Southeast Asia as well as in the U.S. and Europe. She has also presented works in Open Studios in the Netherlands, where she was an artist-in residence in Delft, in 2009, under the a.i.r. program of stichting id11 and in New York state, where she was a resident in Art Omi.