Celline Mercado

Between the Lines (2022-24) explores diasporic identity linked to the psychological impacts of colonialism through sculptural installation. My artworks are informed by my lived experience as a Filipino migrant struggling with colonial mentality. Relocating to Australia from the Philippines prompted me to develop a creative methodology where pieces of furniture are fully wrapped in yarn and suspended. With this, I perform a repetitive and durational type of labor to construct spaces that evoke the uncanny to convey liminality and precarity. This intends to examine and communicate my trauma and displacement.

My installations use aesthetic forms of the uncanny or the unhomely to create atmospheres that oscillate between the strange and familiar. This captures how it feels to be a migrant, constantly experiencing liminality physically and psychologically. The in-between is alluded to by forming tensions through materiality. Hard furniture is wrapped in wool; pastel coloured, soft and soothing, the tactile quality of the yarn seeks to be playful and inviting, but the countless threads painstakingly lined to perfectly shape around the objects can gesture to obsessive labor and a troubled mental state. Suspension seeks to make the objects seem weightless and fanciful, but dually, it is furniture without function and arrested in limbo. Parallel to how I left my home country, the objects have left the domestic and cannot return.

My work seeks to shed light on the oppressive circumstances of expatriation as a result of colonialism. By repetitively performing rigorous labor in the sculpture-making process, I attempt to sympathise with Filipino migrant labourers who endure precarious and strenuous working conditions. My labor comes in the form of wrapping; abstracted from an everyday context and applied intensively as art-making, I enter a physically demanding and time-consuming process that allows for introspection. Performing this type of labor then is imperative as it serves to capture more tensions: it is meditative yet confining, exhausting yet enlightening.

The crisis of the Filipino identity is an ongoing negotiation haunted by colonialism. I suffer from colonial mentality, a type of collective depression characterised as ethnic and cultural inferiority. Through my artworks, I seek to encapsulate this reality and foster self-decolonisation, to unbind myself from colonial trauma. As the project progressed, I started to see how the impacts of my country’s colonial history fuelled my desire to migrate in the first place. Now grappling with being diasporic, my artworks act as conduits and manifestations of my ever-shifting state. Suspension amplifies this, embodying identity as being in constant flux.

Breathing Room (2024) is the final installation of the project. It presents the transient space of a dorm room at its bare minimum, featuring a bed frame, a desk, a swivel chair, and a table lamp. The blue should invite reverie; the bottom halves of the objects are covered in ambiguous grey, almost as if they were dipped in ink. The light from the lamp gently glows and wanes, breathing in and out. Every element intends for a slow encounter. The light is synced to a recording of my breathing whilst in meditation. With no sound, it prompts the viewer to detect the rhythm and focus on their own breathing, to be mindful of their presence. The grey that cuts off the blue attempts to form an illusion of submergence. The viewer then has to ‘wade through’. By alluding to liquid, possibly water, I contemplate the passage of time and its alleged linearity. How do we occupy time and space, and how ought we navigate it? Disillusioned but ever disconcerted and now palpably diasporic, creating this work was a way for me to regain my bearings as I yield to relentless impermanence. Before I go, let me catch my breath.

Celline Mercado (b. 1997, Philippines) is a visual artist always caught in between, searching for a soft place to land. As a Filipino woman of Japanese descent, she is thematically interested in migration, labor and colonial histories. With emphasis on materiality and repetition, her works take form as prints, soft sculptures and installations.

Celline was born and raised in San Fernando, Pampanga. Prior to completing a Master of Fine Art at RMIT, she received a Bachelor of Fine Art, Double Major in Information Design and Art Management with a Minor in Japanese Studies from the Ateneo de Manila University. She has exhibited works around Asia, the United States and Australia, with solo exhibitions at Galleria Duemila and the Pintô Art Museum. Her works are held in private collections in the Philippines and Australia. She divides her time between Pampanga and Melbourne.

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