Woven into the fabric of Marina Cruz’s art are threads of family.
The floods came, as regular as the tides. The ground floor of Marina Cruz’s childhood home, and those of her neighbors in Hagonoy, Bulacan, would get filled with water every time the moon was new or full. Flooding was a way of life. “It’s really part of the breathing in and out of the town,” Cruz says. Hagonoy is built on a naturally flood-prone delta crisscrossed by a network of rivers and streams that flow out to Manila Bay. As a kid, these events signaled moments to play with paper boats and catch fish. Families that could, reconfigured their situation to a life lived upstairs. Cruz depicted these watery scenes in a series of paintings of her ancestral home and the alleyways around it submerged in a foot of floodwater, like it was just another feature of the landscape.
Over time, the floods got worse, especially during the monsoons. What was an inevitable, but mainly inconvenient fact of living in a coastal town took on a more catastrophic turn as climate change accelerated. In light of the recent revelations of ghost projects and flood control scams in Bulacan, Cruz’s growing-up years are now tinged with a sense of the tragic, knowing that the money that could have gone to preventing livelihoods and homes from getting washed away have, for so many years, been lining the pockets of the corrupt.
Because of the impracticality of artists living in floodwater, Cruz and her husband Rodel Tapaya left Hagonoy to live further inland in Guiguinto, Bulacan, to raise their three kids in a subdivision dense with potted plants from nearby nurseries. A short walk from their home is the Istorya Studios compound, built on former farmland that belonged to Cruz’s great-grandfather. Initially serving as a studio for archiving their works, last November 2024 they added a bookshop, built over what was the garage. Dedicated to selling only Filipino publications, the bookshop has become a community center with weekly readings for the neighborhood children and activities like typewriting workshops using functioning vintage typewriters from Cruz’s personal collection (which now numbers 40).
The bookshop evolved from a project the couple initiated during the pandemic, a time when the forced pivot to online classes tested parents to their limits. Cruz and Tapaya saw this as an opportunity to take homeschooling into their own hands. Marina, who comes from a family of educators, handled math and science, while Rodel took charge of Araling Panlipunan. As a family of gamers (board games, that is), Tapaya thought it would be more fun to gamify the process of learning about Filipino figures and events. After playtesting with friends and educators and consulting with historian Ambeth Ocampo, the final versions were released to the public as card games called Patandaan and Sangangdaan. This new creative outlet naturally led to publishing books, mainly artist-authored collaborations that land somewhere in between komiks and fine art. Istorya Studios has so far published five titles under its series Tagpo, including street artist Archie Oclos’s ode to stray cats, Doktor Karayom’s gory vignettes of being in grade 3, Tapaya’s own Alulong that extends, in graphic novel form, the layered mythological universe that his characters populate, and Cruz’s Sandaang Damit (100 Dresses), a timeline of family history laid out in needle and thread.
“All the things I do connect me to the family. There’s domestic history.”
In Sandaang Damit, a photograph of a pinafore dress, made c. 1953, is described as being hand-sewn by Marina’s grandmother Lola Edeng, worn by Marina’s mom Elisa, with a lost duplicate worn by her twin Laura, when they were two years old: “The material used here was recycled from chicken feed packaging.” Upcycled flour sack shirts, which have become trendy of late, have origins in the Great Depression. From the 1920s to 1950s, sewing dresses out of feed sacks was a cultural phenomenon in rural America, particularly during wartime when fabric was rationed. Feed sacks, before paper was used, were made out of cotton cloth and came in a variety of decorative patterns like gingham and florals.
Cruz’s art has long been associated with paintings of small dresses, the details of their lived-in textures captured in high-definition realism. In the early 2000s, when she was working on her thesis as a fine arts student at University of the Philippines, she came across her mom’s baby baptismal dress. “It was a very pivotal moment for me,” she recalls. “She was diagnosed with emphysema, and I was imagining this reversal, realizing that I’ll be the one taking care of my mom. Life is fragile and vulnerable and ephemeral.” Slowly she discovered more about her family through the many outfits her grandmother stored in bauls for decades. Marina wondered why the garments were never given away and thought Lola Edeng had kept them for sentimental reasons. She found out that, after being passed down from sibling to sibling (there were two more girls after the twins), the clothes were so tattered that her grandmother felt it would be pointless, even embarrassing, to donate them.
In Fractured Fabric, Marina’s latest solo exhibition at Silverlens Gallery, the artist closes in on the fraying, fading, and fragile qualities of the textiles she keeps returning to. There is a proliferation of dots and circles, patterns that suggest fullness, completion, a returning home. They also signify the unavoidable holes that appear in fabric whose threads have been loosened with wash and wear. Like a magnified photograph, Marina focuses on the parts torn and ripped, mended and patched over: the marks of frugality and resourcefulness. In other abstract pieces, she uses gauzy material as a tool to create texture or leave an imprint, while in her series of collage portraits, she embroiders directly on the canvas. “This is channeling the younger me when I was enjoying texture and non-figurative works,” she says. “It also shows the range of what I can do, technically and conceptually.”
For over 20 years, Cruz has been building iterations on this subject, exploring motifs of memory, history, narrative, and femininity in a highly personal way. But these intimate portraits, each detailed stroke, a thread-by-thread reconstruction of the article of clothing, also speak to society at large, drawing attention to the stark contrast between a time when people were intentional about clothing versus today’s social media-fueled mentality of overconsumption. Clothes weren’t thrown away just because they had holes. They were fixed and given an extension on life.
“I want to try to look into what we are doing here in the community.”
“My teacher, the late Leo Abaya, called me a minimalist. Even if my painting is highly figurative, with colors and all, I’m very straightforward in my approach, sometimes very literal,” she explains. Cruz considers herself blessed to possess all this generational material, which imbues the work with more meaning than had she gone looking for fabric at a store. “I’m just working with the family archive. All the things I do connect me to the family. There’s domestic history. That for me is very special for my art practice.”
Her show at Silverlens represents a full circle of her practice, Cruz says, after which she plans to take a little break. “I want to try to look into what we are doing here in the community. It’s interesting how this experiment that we have is unfolding, how we can teach again through these books and through other publications.”
Last April, the couple opened Kape Lunan due to insistent popular demand from their bookstore patrons. A coffee shop was not originally part of their plan, but it makes perfect sense in this place. Cruz explains that the meaning of Guiguinto has naught to do with gold, but its origins as a checkpoint during the Spanish era. The town was a resting spot for soldiers, and travelers who were about to cross a bridge were told to stop [hinto]. The coffee shop and bookstore invite visitors to pause and have their creative energies recharged. Browsing and bookmarking are highly encouraged. Even without any advertising, Kape Lunan is already attracting travelers from Manila, but mostly Bulakenyo from the environs, the exact people they wanted to reach out to when they set up the independent bookshop.
Tapaya muses that their shared love of books must have come from being deprived in high school. It is also what drew them together. As art students, both spent a lot of time in the fine arts library of UP. “I would notice her name on the borrower’s card of many books. I wondered, who is this Marina Cruz?”
The couple has always kept their artistic lives separate. Their individual styles are distinct; Marina delves into her own personal history while Rodel traverses the world of folklore, but where they converge is in their deep storytelling. As they venture into publishing, they continue the vein of creation, turning their art practice, a usually solitary activity, into something shared. Their studio doors open to embrace the wider community, finding new ways to tell Filipino stories.
By AUDREY CARPIO. Photographs by CAMILLE ROBIOU DU PONT. Editors TRICKIE LOPA, PAM QUIÑONES, and DANYL GENECIRAN. Styling by SHARK TANAEL of QURATOR STUDIO. Talent: Marina Cruz. Models: Alexis Gutierrez of Eiveren Models, Agatha Gutierrez of Mercator Models. Producer: Bianca Zaragoza Makeup: Janell Capuchino. Hair: Gab Villegas. Photography Assistant: Odan Juan. Makeup Assistant: David Tirol. Fashion Assistant: Jia Torrato.
