1982-85 / Indigenous materials, fiber, and burlap / 183 x 915 cm / Artist: Paz Abad Santos / Artist’s collection

Inspired by the beauty of indigenous weaves, Abad Santos explored the ethnic theme in her tapestries, which fuse fiber art with painting. Her work, like the tapestry Fun Koyu of the Tboli series, is impressive in its scale, richness of material, technical inventiveness, and creative power. On the burlap support is added abaca fiber and coconut shell in a large multilayered composition, variously textured and encrusted on the surface and in the inner layers like the skin of a strange creature in which sections are half-exposed to reveal the mysterious network of veins and viscera. The colors—applied in dyeing, staining, and painting processes—achieve unusual depth in this work in which the earth-brown, deep red, and black tones are drawn from the Tboli chromatic code. Aside from saturating the material in color, the artist combines numerous stitching techniques, stretches cords and strands to form linear patterns on the surface and apertures, binds elements together, ties knots and creates a diversity of textural motifs; all these have mosaic-like encrustations of coconut shell and colored webs of abaca fiber. Space also becomes a concern in cutout sections and apertures revealing multiple levels. The artist allows for openings or paintings in the fabric, as the work ends irregularly in loose strands to avoid the sense of mechanical intervention and instead conveys the impression of fluidity and continuity of art as in life.