Photographed by Colin Dancel for the April 2025 Issue of Vogue Philippines
At the Earthbound exhibit, Geraldine Javier, Marionne Contreras, and Steffi Cua’s creations carry imprints of Mother Earth.
If you happened to walk through the doors of Mo Space gallery between early February and early March, you would have found yourself face to face with a man-made copse. Crooked bamboo columns stand mere inches from the ceiling, and slung on their branches are t-shirts bearing imprints of leaves (veins, stems, and all) against lavender, aquamarine, and magenta fabrics, coated in an earthy, almost dusty wash.
Smaller bamboo pillars are scattered around the floor; skeletal mannequins holding up skirts, jackets, and tunics. On the right corner, two bamboo trunks are suspended from overhead, serving as racks on which hangers of the same material are hooked. On the opposite corner, a set of prints are collaged next to a display of twigs, and around the room, large tapestries line the walls.
“The exhibit is installed to look like a forest when you enter it,” explains Stephanie Frondoso, the curator behind the show Earthbound. “The clothes are positioned so that visitors would weave around them as they would navigate a forest. And on the far end, there are clothes hanging above, because when we enter a forest, things are not just growing from the ground.”
Displaying the works of Geraldine Javier, Marionne Contreras, and Steffi Cua, the immersive installation is an inquiry into natural materials and individual consumption. Printed on one wall are Frondoso’s words: “They invite us to consider the ethical consequences of what we create and be mindful in representing ourselves as stewards of the earth and carers of others.”
The show features four tapestries by Javier and Contreras, which are meant to represent the seasons. Each one by Javier is “ecoprinted, patchworked and embroidered based on the colors, plants, and animals active during each season,” Frondoso notes. Through Javier’s work, which she describes as a form of archiving and recording of what the seasons used to be, she reflects on how “weather is changing drastically and it won’t be long before we become nostalgic for the good old days of the certainty of a particular season.” She narrates the process: “We used a lot of leaves from our native trees like Talisay, Banaba, Bagras, Salingogon, Tibig, Lipote, et cetera, and the discovery that we have many native trees that can be used for natural dyeing and ecoprinting highlighted the fact that we are living in a very rich, diverse environment.”
Meanwhile, Contreras’ quilts drew from personal experience and “the emotional weight of memory and how it seeps into present circumstances relative to human experience.” Her tapestries were a response to the period between the show’s conception and its realization, during which she underwent changes in her own life: becoming pregnant with and birthing her third child, and moving from Parañaque to Alfonso, Cavite.
From Contreras, there’s also the collection of found twigs wrapped in ecoprinted fabric titled “Twigs Series (Do I look nice enough for you?)” which the artist says is “more on the futility of human effort to replicate the beauty of nature, which I always tap onto. The result is always an almost of the ideal. Such is the difference of human hands to the mathematics of the natural world.” Additionally, she also has a series of small works installed on the floor called “Soft Earth,” made with quilting techniques.
Earthbound’s seed can be traced to Javier, who began ecoprinting (the act of making markings on textiles using dyes from natural materials) two years ago when she discovered the tapestries of Australian visual artist India Flint. Trying ecoprinting herself in her Batangas studio surrounded by gardens and a small farm, Javier was excited about the results and its potential applications in our everyday lives. “We often feel pleasure, that instant gratification upon buying new clothes, but never the more long-lasting joy of being a part in the creation of our clothes,” she narrates. “I knew then that I wanted to mount a show that would involve a collaboration with a designer who is open to designing garments based on our prints.”
After exhibiting some of her ecoprinted textiles at Silverlens gallery in 2023, the artist-farmer shifted her approach to something more scientific, with the goal of discovering and documenting the printing effects of all plants local to the Philippines. For the exhibit, she enlisted the help of Marionne Contreras, a young artist whose own ecoprinting practice began by conducting research in her Parañaque home, with plans to practice printing once she returned to her hometown in Bicol. Once there, she started with plants from her mother’s garden and plants along the nearby river.
The two partnered with designer Steffi Cua of the brand Idyllic Summers, who, according to Contreras, they had met “through a series of fateful introductions” that Javier also describes as serendipitous. After working in London and seeing that even luxury brands (with high price points and smaller productions compared to fast fashion) require markdowns and return-to-vendors, “it dawned on me that fashion’s excess was ingrained and built in the system.” According to The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook, co-published by the United Nations Environment Programme and UN Climate Change, which cites a UNEP 2023 report, the fashion industry “is considered responsible for between two percent and eight percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as well as significant pollution, water extraction and biodiversity impacts, not to mention social injustices worldwide.” Additionally, according to a UNEP 2024 report, “Rich countries use six times more resources and generate 10 times the climate impacts than low-income nations.”
Cua made the decision to return to the Philippines and work with local materials, techniques, and people. Although crafting with artisanal textiles has become familiar to her, working on Earthbound has deepened her personal connection to the materials in ways she didn’t expect. “Knowing that each textile was ecoprinted by hand using plant materials collected from Geraldine and Marionne’s own backyards reminded me of how disconnected we often are from the origins of our clothing,” she ruminates. “We rarely think about who made our garments or where the fibers and dyes come from.”
For the show, she used the fabrics of Javier and Contreras to create 80 pieces that make up 25 distinct looks, reflecting nature’s cycles of birth and decay which were evident in the artists’ works. “The silhouettes shift between soft, seed-like spheres and expansive, blooming forms, evoking flowers in full bloom, then slowly wilting, embodying growth, transformation, and impermanence,” Cua explains. “Another aspect of the collection explores zero-waste pattern cutting. Zero-waste designs often appear simple, but they sometimes require more thought and calculations than conventional methods. I was drawn to this process because it mirrors nature where nothing is wasted and everything has purpose.”
In deciding how to present their research and creations, the team sought to produce an exhibit that felt like both an art show and trunk show, where people could appreciate the works but also try on the clothes. It’s essentially an experiment, Frondoso suggests, as clothes at larger exhibits like the New York Met’s Costume Institute cannot be touched, while visitors at Mo Space were encouraged to experience the pieces on their own bodies.
In hindsight, the tactile aspect may have been what invited a new crowd. “What surprised us about the opening is in many of the art shows, it’s mostly all the same people. But this kind of multidisciplinary collaboration, it opens up audiences. So we ended up seeing audiences who are not typically just art collectors; people who also like clothes, for example.
These larger crowds allow them to better succeed at what they really want to do, which is to educate and spark conversations, and later on, impel actionable change. “Creativity plays a crucial role in bridging this awareness with action,” Contreras insists. “Art moves people beyond statistics and news reports. It creates experiences, evokes memory, and fosters empathy.”
In Batangas, for example, Geraldine hosts workshops in local communities using local flora. “The seemingly irreversible damages our living have done to our environment is a hovering, growing anxiety. Individually, I can only do little. But a collective action can be an effective countermeasure.” She continues, “I used to hate weeds, but with ecoprinting, every plant that grows here is now an interesting source of discovery. So now, we leave the plants alone, we let them grow wild and free. Our community now takes pride in wearing clothes that we’ve ecoprinted. Perhaps if we pay more attention to how we live with our environment, how it nurtures us, that it can teach us how to nurture in return.”
By TICIA ALMAZAN. Photographs by COLIN DANCEL. Art Director: Zoe Sabandal. Model: Maita Hagad.
