Amoy Lapis, the first one-person exhibition by Kathleen Sareena Dagum, draws on Dagum’s memories of growing up in Sultan Kudarat, where she lived close to a school, and of her experiences as an art teacher for high school students in Bulacan.
The woody, dry scent of freshly sharpened pencils is a particularly evocative one for Dagum, given that a pencil is often the first writing instrument that a child learns how to use. It is a smell that might be associated with the process of acquiring new skills; with the significance of names – starting with one’s own – and the lastingness and indefinite possibilities of the written word; and with hard graft alleviated, in part, by the recognition that graphite is easy to erase, which encourages experimentation and practice, because any errors committed are simple to make right.
The aroma could also be suggestive of commonplace evaluations of mental acuity and scholastic aptitude, which can be couched in terms that would apply to pencils as well. One might eventually be led, as Dagum has, to grapple with the long-standing epistemological concept of tabula rasa, which the philosopher John Locke notably claimed to be the basic state of the human mind at birth – for him, while the mind may possess certain innate faculties and predispositions, sensory experience is required to activate them, to render ideas upon “the white paper, void of all characters”.
Working with wood – both scrap and recovered from typhoon-felled gmelina trees – metal wire, acrylic paint, and cloth, Dagum has created sculptures of children who read, fly, dream, and otherwise engage with their peers and the wider physical, imaginary, and virtual worlds that they inhabit. Her playing with scale hints at the relations of power and intimacy in which children find themselves enmeshed and must navigate. It moreover underscores the fluidity of the aforesaid worlds and the porousness, if not the arbitrariness, of the borders that are conventionally thought to exist between them. The sculptures invite the viewer to reflect on the winsome scrappiness of children and the considerable responsibility that rests on the people and the social systems to which they look for direction, sustenance, and care.
The Lockean notion of a free individual capable of authoring oneself once past “the imperfect state of Childhood”, while of necessity contentious, is nevertheless useful, serving as a reminder to become aware of, and temper, the mundane condescension that is prone to creep into the attitudes of parents, teachers, and other adults whenever they pay attention to or interact with children. Even as the school uniforms and jointed extremities of Dagum’s sculptures betoken a certain degree of receptiveness to influence, their featureless faces may be understood as indicating an interiority to which no one is privy – selves held apart and away from scrutiny and attempts at manipulation, in defiance of the naive transparency and malleability that are generally attributed to the young.
Amoy Lapis has been made possible with grant support from Metrobank Art and Design Excellence, a flagship program of the Metrobank Foundation, Inc. Dagum intends to use her proceeds from this exhibition to purchase art materials for students at Kalayakan High School and John J. Russell Memorial High School, at which she had previously taught.