THE SHELF LIFE OF BEING

Pam Quinto

Pam Quinto (b. 1991, Quezon City) graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts, major in Studio Arts (Painting) in 2014 from the University of the Philippines, from which she received the Outstanding Thesis and the Gawad Tanglaw awards for her undergraduate thesis. In the same year, she became part of the inaugural batch of the Artery Mentorship Program organized by Artery Art Space in Manila.

She apprenticed in ceramics under artists Katti Sta. Ana and Roberto Acosta. Quinto’s works explore the potentialities of ceramics as medium and how it is used alongside other forms and materials. In her practice, an astute sensitivity to how ceramics becomes a remnant of memory or sympathy to the human psyche is seen and felt. In her hands, the affective materiality of ceramics is foregrounded and articulated as a certain sense of intimacy and vulnerability in terms of the thematics of the feminine and in relation to an embracing attentiveness to intricate detail and soft forms that foil ceramics’s logic of hardening or objectifying material. This is seen in how the artist uses resin and textile as ceramic objects, the effect of which renders a solid object that visually retains the litheness of fabric. Quinto’s trajectory is prolific: she works with stoneware, cement, and porcelain and deploys these with interdisciplinary forms such as photography, installation, and text. In Quinto’s works, ceramics is both craft and experiment, vessel and venture.

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The Somnolence photographs are the last images of a 5 year photo series documenting the depressive states of the artist’s father and sister, specifically capturing them during periods of oversleeping. This project intended to capture the vulnerability of living with mental illness, and was a means for the artist to process her experience through the lens of a camera. Connected to the earlier half of the series, the Lassitude sculpture was formed as a physical manifestation of the weight of weariness.

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Poeleen Alvarez