Irene Bawer-Bimuyag (b. 1976) creates handwoven textiles that are a celebration of life. A designer, embroiderer, and weaver based in both Baguio City and Lubuagan, Kalinga, her geometric and organic patterns, use of color, and intricate embroidery respond to traditional and contemporary making. She belongs to a long line of weavers in the Kalinga ancestral village of Mabilong, where backstrap looms are found in most homes. Handwoven textiles are sacred in ritual but have also evolved into a livelihood industry. Her work involves being part of an ecology of traditional motifs and symbols. But she also creates to expand this frame of reference. 

In making new work, Irene Bawer-Bimuyag carefully notes where new patterns move a craft that speaks to where her community is, surrounded and often misunderstood by its placement in a formerly “outside world.” Her work, including in traditional dance, is empowered and informed by sustained movement to take space and persist, to continue creating art that returns them to the collective ground origin, to the idea of making a home. Her work represents an examination of what material culture holds in representation and the contemporary indigenous imagination.