Silverlens is pleased to present Membranes, the third solo exhibition by London-based Filipino artist Nicole Coson in its Manila location. With a foundation in printmaking, Coson’s work traverses painting, installation, and sculpture, led by a material investigation of what social and poetic connotations lie within the repetition of forms.

Two everyday objects form the focal point of Membranes: Styrofoam mesh fruit casing and standard plastic shipping crates. Both ubiquitous in the global food supply chain, they speak to the vast journeys that perishable goods undergo before eventual consumption—even those typically perceived as “local” or “native” in a Philippine context. Contending with the long history of the archipelago as a key transnational trading point, Membranes highlights the material infrastructures that lie behind the “exotic” and how they become meaningful in social terms, at home and away, over time.

The standard plastic shipping crate has been an ongoing object of interest for the artist, culminating in the ongoing series Circuits. In a significant deviation from standard printmaking technique, Coson hand-presses large, unstretched pieces of canvas onto crates, effectively imprinting them in dense arrangements. When stretched, they resemble circuit boards or aerial views of cities, the negative space between each mark suggesting roads, alleyways, and passages. As such, the totalizing modularity of the crate design analogizes city planning, but only in its emphasis on inherent imperfection and variability.

Facing these labyrinthine images is an elongated plinth built using yakal, a native Philippine wood. Scattered on top is an arrangement of Styrofoam mesh casings clearly shaped after fruits commonly found in the Philippines: papaya, Philippine persimmon, macopa, Soursop, dragon fruit, jackfruit, pineapple. The conventional ephemerality of these objects is balanced by their evident weightiness, for the casings are in fact hyperrealistic sculptures (Vanitas, 2025) modeled from digital scans and 3D-printed in polyamide, a heavier synthetic material that naturally occurs in silk and wool.

Coson’s arrangement of such absent edibles invites materialist engagement at numerous levels. As historical artefacts, they do not refer to a particular scene or moment in history but rather function as a loose timeline of Philippine import/export relations—from the Manila galleon trade of the 1600s to today. While fruit arrangements could variably convey homes or markets in general, they are also art-historically informed: perishables have long been employed as a motif in conveying histories of trade, such as the “horn of plenty” found in Dutch Renaissance painting, where exotic exploits and wares from the colonies were presented to European audiences and consumers in highly fetishistic fashion.

Coson’s inverted perspective of such iconography—from exactly such tropical locales—supplements hegemonic histories of global trade by pointing to various feedback loops: as countless foreign food items were introduced to the Philippines (such as the papaya, which is locally ever-abundant but in fact hails from South America), the valence of the intra-exotic—as well as the truly indigenous—product are obfuscated within the intensity of global mass distribution.

The short lifespans of such perishable goods—the sculpture’s title, Vanitas, is a direct indication of death—are contrasted by the intensity of their effects on economies, geopolitics, and the natural world over time, profoundly impacting and altering local biodiversity. And yet to write real history through these absent goods is futile, for you will quickly end up with mere shells, casings, amid a larger pile of other things. The hands that produced, shipped, traded, purchased, and consumed these commodities are available to us only as phantasms. The individual commodity can only ever embody these deeply material facts in ghostly terms, that is to say, as a tangible absence. This remains so in today’s accelerated global commodity trade: the humble mesh casing is only ever a marker of an object’s journeying, never its origin or final destination. What they may mark in terms of relative preciousness, they hide in terms of actual value.

As facsimiles and indexes, Coson’s represented carrier objects quietly form a patchy timeline of globalism’s breathtaking and uneven histories of material exchange. Styrofoam mesh and shipping crates are both serially mass-produced and always experienced in generic multiplicity—ripe for a printmaker’s aesthetic interrogation. For Coson, repetition and seriality are conceptual matrixes for questioning the durability of traces across geographies and time. Membranes considers what can be imprinted onto materials, by or as art, and what will inevitably escape it.

– Jeppe Ugelvig

Nicole Coson (b. 1992, Manila) is a Filipino artist based in London. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Royal College of Art London. Working in printmaking, painting and sculpture, Coson’s work explores the process of image-making as it pertains to personal memory, history, and material culture. Coson’s printed canvases oscillate delicately between surface and depth: by imprinting symbolically-loaded found objects onto linen, concrete material culture transforms into analog, indexical images through their negative imprint. This imagistic oscillation between pattern, image, and object is embraced by Coson to tell stories of family, society, and coloniality, but never in straight-forward ways: rather, the artist is deeply committed to the aesthetic politics of opacity and by extension, privacy, secrecy, and intimacy. Rather than alluding to a hidden meaning behind her barrier motifs (camouflage patterns, window blinds, woven baskets, food crates), Coson invites us to study them as such—barriers—and the critical potential of visual obfuscation.

Coson’s work is supplemented by occasional culinary and publishing projects, such as the ongoing Food Stories: The Silk road (2018–), where food is explored as a palimpsest of migration histories— of people, spices, and recipes. Coson was featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2020, and has since held solo exhibitions at Silverlens in Manila, Philippines, Silverlens in New York, and Ben Hunter Gallery in London.