Across these warped formations, tendrils, branches, roots, and other sinuous, irregular forms draw us into a new vocabulary for understanding the landscape as a genre. Enter Is Jumalon’s terrain: a fertile ground that unfixes our traditional ideas of the landscape as a pastoral, panoramic ideal of a place. Any trace of romanticism that exists here is shattered by shards and harsh angles of color that evoke a mutable logic: here are habitats in the service of suggestion and intimacy. 

What hides in plain sight, submerged beneath these ambiguous forms, are the narratives that make up a place, and in Jumalon’s case, these are the rock formations from the Mount Pulong Bato monoliths in Zamboanga where she grew up. Hearing narratives from her parents about the rice fields, mounds of soil, and blades of grass imbued the place with a sense of mystery, danger even, that persists in the visceral hues and collagistic meldings of these paintings. 

In this new series of works, Jumalon paints an inheritance—a way of looking at the world that prioritizes curiosity and welcomes disruption. A form is never just one thing, these paintings suggest, but a series of possibilities which structure and accident conspire to make real. Linger with these pieces and stay with the feelings that they evoke, and soon enough they begin to behave like an entity of sorts. Within these resonances, Jumalon’s paintings exist as their own topography of perceptions and projections, drawing us deeper into the mysteries that reside within and beyond them.  

Words by Sean Carballo