Artist Portrait taken at Sunset Cliffs, San Diego, CA, 2025.
Inquiries:
catsgunnart@gmail.com
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Curatorial:
(b. 1993, Honolulu, HI)
they/them/their
My practice investigates how incomplete access to history affects individual identity and familial bonds in the present. I work in ceramics, sculpture, and installation to create spaces and arrangements reminiscent of deconstructed altars, domestic spaces, and fragmented structures. My compositions of modular pieces— ranging from alchemical material investigations to piles of ceramic fruit to found objects— offer non-linear narratives and interrogate how objects and materiality mediate relationships and memories. Utilizing the framework of racial melancholia, my work evaluates the relationship and imperial impacts of the US occupation of the Philippines from 1898-1946. This melancholia is an unresolved grief or inherent sense of loss resulting from processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialization. I examine the mechanisms of collective forgetting that often erase colonial conquest and imperial violence, instead asking who controls these narratives, why crucial information remains withheld, and how diasporic communities can challenge these stories.
My recent projects use slip cast moldmaking, image transfer, and installation to consider what is lost and gained in acts of transformation, translation, and abstraction. Some artworks play with simulacrum— such as piles of ceramic fruit that serve as offerings on an altar-like construction, but remain eternally ripe and never rotting, inviting contemplation on impermanence and the boundaries of passing, queerness, and perceptions of reality. Other objects offer narratives— such as ceramic pig heads that explore how colonial occupation altered food histories of Filipino dishes, like sisig. Using creative-fictional poetics to offer fragments of personal stories within collective diasporic histories, my own family history becomes the lens through which I explore broader questions of invisibility, silence, and who decides settled history.