2023
Thread and photo transfer on linen
4 x 6 feet
2023
for “Un/Happy Endings”, The Drawing Room
Organza, floral wire, embroidery thread and hand-guided machine embroidered linen bouquet bags
Approx 27 x 14 x 12 inches (each)
2023
Nanay's Everlasting Flowers
Found crochet offcuts, floral wire, embroidery thread and cones of crochet thread
Approx 14 x 4 x 4 inches, approx 11 x 4 x 4 inches
2023
for “Come/Home, Gravity Art Space
My maternal-grandmother, Nanay, was someone who always felt like home.
Whenever Nanay would visit Tatay’s grave, we would light candles, even on a windy day, and she would also bring artificial flowers, which she jokingly called “everlasting” flowers. She would also never leave them in the cemetery and bring them back home to use again for the next visit.
I made two versions of “everlasting” flowers—organza flowers in hand-guided machine embroidered linen bags, and a bunch of flowers made with Nanay’s unfinished crochet pieces placed in unused cones of thread that I bought for her during the pandemic.
Fabric flowers and photo transfer on linen
4 x 3 feet
2023
for “There are always flowers for those who want to see them”, West Gallery
The image for this work—a tree with pink blooms and no leaves—was taken during my tita’s 1st death anniversary. It was a hot, summer afternoon in May–also just 2 days before the 2022 Philippine National Elections. The title is an excerpt from a quote from the movie, Mulan (1998): “The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of them all.”
Photo courtesy of West Gallery
Thread and photo transfer on linen
40 x 40 inches
2022
for “UP SANAG Art Prize”, College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines, Diliman
“In Overgrown (2022), Tee transposes threads on a photograph of grass from their backyard garden. This piece is an extension of similar works featuring photos of vacation spots the artist has traveled to, thereby touching on notions of rest and recuperation. However, here she opted to return to an image closer to everyday life. For Tee, the garden is a site that reflects the world’s cadence and rhythms, as well as a transitional space that straddles domestic existence and the larger world. It evokes a feeling for cyclical unfoldings, thereby allowing for ruminations on that which endures and persists. In utilizing the garden as locus, the artist often subjects the thread’s softness to the abstraction of a grid or a geometric shape. Tensions arise between austere compositions and the unruliness of thread mimicking grass. These mirror the dynamic Tee has long pursued: outside and inside, change and permanence, domesticity and public life, or even, the flow of time and the forces that transcend the temporal.
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Perhaps one way to look at Tee’s artistic endeavors then is to consider rootedness—to one’s family, faith, and beliefs—and to trace the avenues and explorations that these roots have helped grow.” — excerpt from catalog written by JC Rosette