My grandmother is often a subject in my personal artwork for a multitude of reasons. With a busy working mother, my grandmother was the one to raise me—I even called her “Inay” which means “mother” in Tagalog. Being raised by her as a child and then later experiencing the role reversal of helping to take care of her in her senior years as she suffers from dementia has had a deep impact on my personal life and is often reflected in my personal work.

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Pag-uwi (Returning Home)
Digital Artwork, 2017

I created this piece to be presented at the FilAmFest in Paradise Hills, San Diego, in 2017. It is also currently featured in the Filipinos of South Bay exhibit at the Chula Vista Library.

The write-up to go alongside this piece:

My grandma grew old in another country where she didn’t speak the language. She became a widow, outlived the few friends she made here, and watched her grandchildren grow up and move out of the house. She would often be home alone with her thoughts and memories while my parents worked and we grandchildren were either at school or working as well. She started to develop dementia in her late 80s and, as it worsened, her mind often escaped (or should I say returned) to her life in the Philippines. Eventually it was as if she no longer lived in the present time and space anymore as we began to lose her to dementia.

Navigating the reverse caretaking rolls in the family took a heavy emotional toll and strain on all of us, causing tension and division between different members of the family. As we figured out how to divide our duties and to give her the best care possible as our utang ng loob, or “debt of gratitude”, she grew more and more distant and oblivious to these issues that we had to face as the dementia took hold. While figured out the logistics of our new reality, she spent the last decades of her life reliving her memories, good and bad, in the streets of Tarlac and Manila and revisiting the friends and family that she had lost and missed all those years ago until she could finally rejoin them.

Her name was Trinidad Marquez Castell. She passed away on August 4th, 2022, at the age of 103.

Inay
collage and ink, 2011

This was a piece I made for an assignment as a Visual Arts student at UC San Diego. Around this time my grandmother’s dementia started to worsen and she was often confined to her room and her bed. She always wore colorfully patterned clothes and her bed was also adorned with patterned blankets and pillows. With this piece I wanted to portray her lost in all those patterns using origami paper collage.

Untitled collage pieces from 2011