Echoing circles and swirls in polka dots, print-like collages with ghostly images, and lines, stripes, texture, and patterns on fabric, Marina Cruz presents seemingly abstract works in three parts in a solo exhibition, Fractured Fabric, at Silverlens, Makati until November 8, 2025.
The first part is a series of photorealistic paintings of the dresses based on details (“their patterns, textures, and minute details”) of old and worn-out children’s clothes made by her grandmother for Marina’s mother and her twin sister. It celebrates their fragility and all the stitches and mends through time.
Seven paintings share patterns of polka dots, balls, and orbs with Cruz comparing them to snow, circles, blood cells, and the moon. Some of their titles: Unpredictability of Repetitions, white polka dots on a red background that show textured grid lines of the cloth itself; it also shows the fabric’s wear and tear in a gaping hole and frayed spots and edges, almost disintegrating in front of our eyes; Snow Speckles on a Summer Wear, another white polka dots on a red background that show a front of a dress lined with white buttons. From its crinkled texture, it is made of a light and sheer cloth like chiffon, silk, or organza; Full Moon New Moon and a Void with a design of balls of yarns in different sizes in oranges, pinks, browns on a white background with zigzag patterns; and Calm and Chaos in Circles, dots of orange, blue, pink in various sizes, textured with white vertical lines of yarn.
Only two works show an entire dress in view: Tender, 2025, a child’s frilly and tattered dress with white polka dots on a red background; Both Fruit and a Color, 2024, a child’s dress, full of ruffles, in orange with a checkered pattern embellished with white lace.
Mixed media works
The second part is series of mixed media works where the artist transferred imprints of gauze-like cloths such as lace and crochet through a print-like technique. Ghost-like images haunt the surface of each work, like traces of memories that always linger in our minds.
A veil floats in a murky sea of violet in A Veil Left by the Tides of Life, 2025; Veins of Bandages, 2025 traces of strips of gauze crisscrossing each other and overlaid with stripes of green and reddish purple.
Flood havoc
Amidst the public anger over flood control projects and massive corruption, several mixed media works reference the permanent state of flooding and climate devastation in some parts of the country. like Hagonoy, Bulacan, where flooding is part of life, the hometown of Cruz’s grandmother.
In four iterations of Flood Footprints, traces of fabric blended in heavy shades of earth colors result in thick and uneven texture like the heavy mud and silt that flood waters leave everywhere in its aftermath.
The third part is a series of fabric collages where the artist stitched scraps of garments onto canvas, and made “splotches, rough strokes, and organic patterns.” Hazy images of people emerge, like apparitions in fragmented dreams.
Sense of certainty
In Cruz’s words, her works ask questions: What is home for you? What’s family for you? What gives you grounding? She believes that you must hold on to something, otherwise, you can be swept away easily by life’s flood, by challenging times.
A grandmother’s treasure
When Marina Cruz was a student and making some abstract prints, she was looking for a pattern of gauze, a material used for covering wounds and fractures. In her grandmother’s home, she discovered in 2002 her mother’s baptismal dress and over a hundred children’s dresses worn by her mother and her twin sister. Kept in storage despite their tattered state, with holes, stains, and frayed spots, her grandmother had made all these clothes.
It represents a time when making by hand is the norm. Handmade that is durable and long lasting, the opposite of a throwaway mentality and instant gratification in today’s fast fashion with its obscene waste of resources impacting adversely the environment.
Both heartbreaking and heartwarming, the clothes possess enormous value for Cruz, representing the passing down of experience and family history, proof of the power of memory and identity.
Meticulous renderings of clothes with all its crinkles, ruffles, trimmings, stains, and stitches reflect Marina’s total artistic control. The clothes with its holes and frayed edges have become witness to our own fragility and vulnerability, the inevitable ravage of nature against our mortal bodies.
In her trajectory as an artist, Marina Cruz pays a tribute to her lodestar, a beloved grandmother and a strong woman who had defied and succeeded against the conventions of her time.
Marina Cruz (b. 1981. Lives and works in Guiguinto, Bulacan): A fine arts graduate of the University of the Philippines Diliman, she is a recipient of the Thirteen Artists Awards, Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2012; the Freeman Fellowships, Vermont Studio Center in 2007; and the grand prize of the Philippine Art Awards and the Ateneo Art Awards in 2008.